


To Guard You and to Guide You

by Lauralot



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - BDSM, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Asexual Character, Blood, Brainwashing, Canon-Typical Violence, Celibacy, Cunnilingus, Dildos, Edgeplay, Hand Jobs, Implied/Referenced Torture, Medical Experimentation, Mild Gore, Multi, Multiple Orgasms, Polyamory, Sex Toys, Soul Bond, Sub Drop, Threesome - F/M/M, Vibrators
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2015-01-05
Packaged: 2018-03-03 10:18:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 28,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2847455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lauralot/pseuds/Lauralot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Machines do not fall in love.  Machines do not have soul mates.</p><p>But even all of HYDRA's programming can't keep the Winter Soldier from bonding.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Let Me Be Your Shelter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bofurrific](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bofurrific/gifts).



The serum, Steve is sure, will fix everything.

The first time Steve sees a bond form, he’s nine. He and Bucky are at the market, running errands for their mothers, when two women brush hands while reaching for apples at the fruit stand. There’s a rush of air like a windstorm, a flare of light, and Steve turns to take a closer look. The women’s hands are locked together now.

He’d once asked his mother what people look like when they bond and she said that they glow. It’s true, but Steve had pictured some kind of heavenly spotlight shining down on the bonded. This light comes from inside them and it almost hurts to look at, though Steve can’t tear his eyes away. They’re nearly translucent with the shine, brighter streaks of light racing through their veins. They look like angels. One of the women goes weak in the knees and the other—the dom, Steve thinks—supports her as the light begins to fade.

Steve’s staring. Everyone is. He feels settled somehow, safe, the cough that’s been rattling in his chest forgotten. Beside him, Bucky is trembling. Without thinking, driven by impulses he’s just barely beginning to understand, he grabs Bucky’s hand and leads him to the nearest alley. He holds Bucky’s arms tight enough to bruise, kissing until Bucky’s still and Steve’s gasping for air.

“I’m sorry,” he says, but Bucky just smiles and rubs his back until the wheezing stops.

“I want that,” Bucky says, looking back the way they came. “I—with you. If you want it.”

“Of course I do.” Bucky’s scarf is slipping off and Steve reaches up to fix it. “I wanna spend the rest of my life with you, Buck. I want—someday, I wanna be the one to take care of you.”

“But that didn’t happen with us.” Bucky bites at his lip, worrying. Bucky’s always the one who’s worrying, even though Steve’s the one who’s constantly sick or getting in fights. Fights Bucky usually finishes. “When we met.”

“We’re not old enough,” Steve says, gathering up their shopping bags. He’s heard legends on the playground, rumors that at somebody’s friend’s cousin’s school a pair of kindergartners bonded, but he’s been hearing those stories for years and that’s all they are, stories. “You have to have a dom and a sub to make a bond, and we’re not anything yet.”

“You’ll be my dom?” Bucky asks, so solemnly that Steve can’t help but laugh.

“Look at us, Bucky. I think it’ll be the other way around.”

But it isn’t.

The delineation tests at school start in the second grade, because some girls differentiate that early. Steve’s ten before he gives the examiners answers that lend themselves to classification, and weeks later they get the papers in the mail that register him as a dominant. His mother smiles and hugs him tight. He’s one of the first boys delineated at school and for a few weeks the bullies linger back, awed.

Bucky takes much longer. Every year his tests come back inconclusive and every year Bucky says his father paces the floor all night when the results come in. “They say the longer boys take, the more likely they’re subs,” Bucky says one day. Steve’s sick in bed and Bucky’s been reading to him, but now he’s staring at the floor, eyes wet. “I—I want to be yours, Steve. I’ve always wanted it. But I don’t want my parents to cry anymore.”

Steve’s hand finds his. Bucky blinks away the tears and reads on.

He gets the designation on his sixteenth birthday. “Hell of a present,” Bucky mutters. “I said at least subs have the vote now and my dad put his fist through the wall. Had to get stitches.”

Bucky’s shaking. Steve reaches up and grabs him by the back of the neck, guiding him to his knees. He buries his face in Steve’s chest and sobs as Steve strokes down his neck and shoulders. “You’re all right,” Steve murmurs, over and over until Bucky’s breathing settles. “I’ll take care of you.”

It would be perfect. But there’s no lights, no wind. No bond.

Steve blames his body.

Doms are meant to provide for their subs, to protect them. Steve is frail and sickly and stuck in bed often enough that it’s Bucky supplying their main income. They would be bonded, Steve’s sure, if not for his weakness.

They make things work as well as they can. They’re barely making ends meet what with all of Steve’s medicine, but there’s a roof over their heads and sometimes they go dancing just so Steve can watch Bucky’s eyes light up. Bucky’s parents don’t approve, Steve knows. They love him like a son but they want someone who can take care of their child. Sometimes Steve agrees, though it feels like his chest is breaking open. Once he tells Bucky as much.

“I’m not goin’, Sir,” Bucky says, sliding down on the sofa until his head is resting in Steve’s lap. “I’m with you ‘till the end of the line, like it or not.”

“Guess I have no choice.” Steve smiles, stroking through Bucky’s hair.

And Bucky doesn’t leave, no matter how sick Steve gets or how many black eyes he comes home with. Bucky just piles on more blankets or dabs ice at Steve’s wounds, shaking his head. “Aren’t _I_ supposed to be the one who likes getting punched?”

Maybe it’s not the best for either of them, but it’s their life and it’s as happy as they can make it.

Until Bucky gets the draft letter in the mail.

Steve goes to the recruitment office the day it’s announced that America’s entered the war. The rejection’s expected, but that doesn’t make it sting any less. The only thing that keeps him from going right back out the next day and trying again in New Haven is Bucky, waiting for him at the door of their apartment, eyes both hopeful and worried. Sure, Bucky can take care of himself if he has to, but he _shouldn’t_ have to. If Steve can’t serve his country, the least he can do is be there for his sub.

Then Bucky’s drafted.

They changed the laws in the first World War so that the draft could include subs. They needed more bodies in the line, and all the fuss that the church and the submissive suffragettes and a whole lot of moral decency groups kicked up wasn’t enough to keep the bill from passing.

Bucky reports to training. He’s skilled and that gives Steve a flare of pride that keeps him going when every new recruitment office he tries rejects him. On Bucky’s last night Steve takes him to the World’s Fair, holds him close, and sends him off to say goodbye to his parents before trying one more time at the US Army booth.

They offer him a chance. He takes it without hesitation.

He’s brought to Fort Lehigh for training, where he meets Peggy Carter. From the first glimpse, it’s obvious she’s dominant and Steve would never betray his sub regardless, but the swell in his chest when he looks at Agent Carter is the same that he feels looking at Bucky.

She’s stern and rough and so beautiful it makes him ache. On the ride to the Project Rebirth procedure, she offers him a kiss. Maybe out of pity, maybe because she think he’s going to die.

He’s heard that kisses between two doms or two subs feel like kissing one’s own sibling, but that’s not how it is with Peggy. It’s nice. Almost perfect. But there’s something missing, like a watch with all the cogs in place, yet no hands. They pull away frowning.

“Guess it doesn’t really work with two doms,” Steve says, forcing a laugh. But it nearly had.

“I was once in a London hospital, assisting after bombings,” Peggy says. She’s looking out the window, thoughtful. “There was an injured man brought in, a dominant, and a doctor and nurse were helping him off of a stretcher, and the three of them, another dominant and a submissive, they bonded. I hadn’t thought it could happen outside of legends, but I saw it with my own eyes.”

“I wouldn’t have thought,” Steve says as their car comes to a stop, “that _this_ could happen outside of legend either.” 

The serum works. Dr. Erskine dies. Steve and Peggy are separated and Steve becomes a mascot, a gimmick. A joke. The USO tours across the country and overseas makes it impossible for Bucky to write back to Steve’s letters, but Bucky’s still the only thing that keeps Steve going. The serum fixed his body. He can finally be what Bucky needs and when they’re reunited, they’ll bond. They have to.

He meets Peggy again on tour. She fills him in on what’s happened to the 107th and bribes Howard Stark to fly Steve into enemy territory. At the prison camp he finds Bucky delirious, strapped down in an isolation ward. He picks Bucky up and his submissive’s surprise at that would be comical in any other situation. “Did it hurt, Sir?” Bucky asks, struggling to focus his stare. “Is it permanent?”

It’s not until much later, when they’re safe and marching back to base, when Steve realizes. There was no light when they touched. No wind.

No bond.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story (and each of its chapter titles) is named from the lyrics of the _Phantom of the Opera_ song ["All I Ask of You."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfPLh_6ckzI)


	2. Say You Need Me with You

They separate the doms and the subs in the prison camp. A guard checks the status on Bucky’s tags and smirks, hauling him away from the rest of his unit. There are hands on him, whispers in his ear as he’s shoved into a cell. Bucky half-understands the words—he catches “pretty” and “see you soon” and swallows back bile—but he’s been trained for the possibility of captivity. He knows better than to react.

He’s the highest ranking sub in the cell. One of the others is in shock. Bucky orders him to kneel and presses a hand on the back of his neck, because that’s what Steve would do.

Steve, Bucky knows, would sacrifice himself when the guards return demanding a volunteer. They don’t say what for. The sub taken from the neighboring cell yesterday never came back. Bucky runs a shaking hand over his face to wipe away the tears and stands up.

Before they strap him down they remove his jacket and he breaks a guard’s wrist in his struggle to get it back. The air in the compound is frigid but he doesn’t give a damn about his comfort. Steve’s letters are in that jacket, in an inner pocket against Bucky’s chest.

They beat him senseless and strap him down. Once the jacket’s gone, Bucky stops fighting. His recitation of name, rank, and serial number is rote, not defiance. Something’s injected in his veins, something burning, and maybe it will stop his heart but they stole away his only connection to Steve and Bucky can’t bring himself to care now what they do to his body. It can’t be worse than that.

Or so he thinks until they find the letters.

He has flashes of reality when the injections start to fade away, glimpses when the pain recedes. One day the hurt is not so much and when he comes back to himself the HYDRA doctor is stroking his hand the way that Steve would, saying “Bucky, Bucky.” And Bucky isn’t the name on his tags.

Steve couldn’t tell Bucky about his work in the letters, couldn’t discuss any part of Bucky’s service because Bucky couldn’t write back. But he could talk about the things they did together, and now their lives are laid bare before Bucky’s captors. There are sounds and Bucky realizes the sounds are from him and he’s stopped reciting his name, rank, and serial number. He’s mewling, leaning toward the touch.

There’s something boiling inside him that Bucky thinks is rage until it forces its way out and he’s sick all over himself.

He doesn’t know how long he lies on the table, drifting in and out of awareness. There are voices above him: “Bucky” and “sweet boy” and so many things in German. Sometimes he’s able to recite as he’s meant to. Sometimes he tries to swallow his tongue.

One day as he’s coming out of the haze, there’s a face that’s familiar and wonderful and all wrong. “Bucky?” And Bucky struggles to focus. He _knows_ that voice, he knows it so well, and the accent is American. “Oh my God.” There’s a tug and clattering as Bucky’s restraints are pulled away. “It’s me,” says the voice. “It’s Steve.” And it looks like Steve, mostly.

“Steve?” Bucky’s either dreaming or dying. He doesn’t much care as long as Steve is with him.

Then Steve’s picking him up and Bucky must be dreaming. “I thought you were dead.”

“I thought you were smaller,” Bucky says. He thinks Steve answers, but they’re moving now and the world is spinning. “What happened to you? Sir?”

“I joined the army.”

It’s a funny dream. It’s not one he can tell Steve about if he ever sees him again. Steve would smile and laugh and then look off and frown when he thought Bucky couldn’t see. Steve hates his body; it would be cruel to tell him that Bucky dreamed him up as a perfect dominant.

Around them, there are deafening, sweltering explosions. The injections make the dreams so vivid. Bucky sees the doctor again and he thinks the only reason he doesn’t faint is because he’s already sleeping. He thinks Steve fights a demon. Then they’re separated by fire and distance and Steve orders Bucky to go without him. Bucky refuses, his disobedience and fear sending violent tremors through his frame.

Steve makes it out of the fire because of course he does, but knowing it’s a dream doesn’t make Bucky’s heart stop hammering. It isn’t until Steve has gathered all the escapees and is marching them back to base that Bucky begins to feel anything beyond fear and love and adrenaline. Every step hurts. The injections were like fire in his blood and now there are ashes scraping along his veins.

He thinks he’s waking up. He doesn’t want to.

When they make camp for the night, Bucky and Steve take the first perimeter check. Bucky catches Steve staring at him sadly and his breath catches. “Tell me not to wake up, Sir,” he begs. “I don’t want to lose you.”

Steve takes his hand and holds hard enough to ache through the reassurance. His touch is solid and grounding and there are tears of relief running down Bucky’s face even before Steve speaks. “You’re not dreaming, Bucky. And I’ll never leave you again, I swear.”

Bucky learns the full story the next day, when Falsworth asks how Steve got into the camp and why he’s called Captain America. When Steve explains about the USO performances and the tights, Bucky cries again, this time from laughter. He’d nearly forgotten how to laugh. Each giggle is like a stab in the chest, yet it brings such contentment.

“Hey!” Bucky yells to the others once they’re standing before the Colonel. “Let’s hear it for Captain America!”

And everyone cheers.

Then there’s a woman before Steve. A dom, Bucky knows, because female subs are still barred from service. She’s beautiful and she’s chiding Steve about being late before her eyes fall on Bucky. “This is your friend?”

There’s a flutter in Bucky’s chest to realize Steve’s told people about him.

“Yeah,” Steve says, and he’s staring at the both of them. Bucky can’t read his face. “Yeah, and he needs to see a medic.” He slides his hand into Bucky’s before Bucky can protest that he’s all right, and turns his attention to the woman again. “Could you—”

She takes Bucky’s opposite hand as they begin to lead him. Steve’s eyes dart between them a second time and something falls in his expression.

Later Steve puts says he’s putting together a team and asks if there’s anyone Bucky can recommend. Bucky can only give him Jones and Dugan’s names; all the other men he worked with are dead or too injured to keep fighting. Steve recruits the others off of their suggestions before he returns to Bucky. “How about you? Are you ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?”

And that’s Steve. He has the whole army at his disposal and he asks the sub who isn’t even able to bond with him. He _asks._

He meets Steve’s eyes. He has to look up a little to do that now, and each time he feels lost until he finds Steve’s gaze again. “I’ll follow that little dom from Brooklyn who waited six years for me to figure out what I was,” he says. “Not Captain America.”

Steve smiles, throws an arm around him, and gets him another drink.

The female dom walks in and they rise. “Captain,” she says. She’s smiling.

“Agent Carter.” Steve is smiling too. He’s glowing, casting the faintest of glances to Bucky before his eyes are back on her.

They’re both dominants. But there are legends, and who knows what the serum in Steve’s veins is capable of? What Steve _himself_ is capable of? They’re bonded, they must be. And Steve still promised never to leave Bucky. He’s a saint. Bucky can’t hold him to it; it isn’t fair to Agent Carter.

“I see your top squad is prepping for duty,” she’s saying.

“You don’t like music?” Bucky asks. He has to say something, has to distract himself from the stabbing pain in his chest. He glances down and is almost surprised that there’s no blood blossoming across the fabric.

“I do, actually,” the agent says. “I might even, when this is all over, go dancing.”

“What are you waiting for?” He already knows the answer. She’s waiting for him to leave. For Steve to let him go.

And she confirms it. “The right partner.”

He lets out the breathe he’s been holding, struggling to keep his shoulders from shaking. “I’ll leave you to it.” Bucky turns to go.

But Agent Carter has hold of his arm, stopping him. “I’m talking about you.”

Steve takes his hand and they guide him back to their quarters to explain.

“I love you, Buck.” They’re seated on the bed, Steve on one side and Agent Carter—Peggy, she says—on the other. “I’ll always love you. And Peggy, she means the world to me. Without her, I couldn’t have saved you. And without you, we can’t fit.” He’s tracing the curve of Bucky’s lips with his thumb, letting Bucky rest his head on Steve’s shoulder. “The three of us—we don’t _need_ a bond. We’re meant to be. I know it. We’ll take care of you, Bucky, if you’ll let us.”

Peggy’s hand is on his thigh. “You can say no, Barnes, if you want to. We’ll understand.”

“That’s right,” Steve murmurs, his mouth against Bucky’s hair. “You can always say no. You know that?”

“I know,” Bucky says. “But I don’t want to say it.”

They lay him out on the bed, stripping his clothes off before removing their own. Peggy bends over him, pressing her red lips to his mouth. Her kisses start off quick and soft, though as Steve nudges Bucky’s legs apart, they grow deeper and hungrier. Bucky’s gasping long before Steve’s fingers slip inside of him.

Peggy kneels over Bucky’s face as he eases his knees over Steve’s shoulders. Steve’s hands, broad and familiar, are gripping Bucky’s hips as Peggy winds her thin fingers in his hair. He’s never pleasured a woman before, never been with anyone but Steve, but he knows at least the basics of eating out a lady. He’s read things, heard things. Bucky’s own father told him what he needed to do to fuck a girl—or a boy—with his tongue or fingers or cock. His father used to have a lot of those talks, like it could make his son come out dominant.

And Peggy’s not shy about teaching him.

Steve can be forceful, both in discipline and the bedroom; Bucky’s walked away bruised before the serum. But he’s almost always cautious, always sweet, asking “Is this all right?” and “How does that feel?” Now that he’s bigger, he’s moving as if Bucky’s made of glass.

Peggy is rough. She guides him by the hair with sharp little tugs that make his scalp blaze and eyes flutter, breathing admonishment and praises as she thrusts her hips. “For God’s sake, Barnes, close your eyes,” she says, and “Don’t be so slow, boy, I haven’t all day,” and “Yes, do that again, good.”

Eventually there are more encouragements than reprimands before the words fall away entirely, and Peggy is only panting and moaning and grinding against his mouth. Bucky’s body is jostled from the force of Steve’s thrusts and when Steve angles just right inside him, his tongue loses its rhythm. There’s tugging on his hair again and Bucky tries to correct himself, but then Peggy’s crying out. Bucky holds her hips through the aftershocks before she slides off and curls on the mattress beside him.

“Look at you,” she murmurs, peppering his face and mouth with kisses, still struggling to catch her breath. “Look how well you take the Captain.” Peggy reaches out, rolls his nipple between her pretty fingers as Steve begins jerking Bucky’s cock.

“You’re so good, Bucky,” he says, a flush spread over his face and chest. “You’re beautiful, stretched open around me. You make me feel so good.”

It’s Bucky who finishes first with a loud howl muffled by Peggy’s mouth. Steve follows right after, the force of his orgasm shoving them together, Bucky’s legs pinned between their bodies. It’s a burning, beautiful stretch.

“You’re perfect,” Steve tells him, warm hands wiping the contented tears from Bucky’s face. “My sweet boy, you’re everything we ever needed.”

Peggy smiles. For once her touch is gentle, soothing against the scratches she left on his chest. “Yes,” she says, “I think this is going to work.”

Bucky’s never felt so whole.


	3. Share Each Day with Me

It’s strange to think of life as perfect during a war, but that’s just what it is.

He has Steve and he has Peggy, and that’s all Bucky needs, even when there are bullets flying around him or memories of the prison camp keeping him up through the night. It takes adjusting: Peggy can’t accompany them on most missions and Steve’s still learning how to handle his new body. So is Bucky. Once he thrusts just like he always did before the serum, except Steve’s taller now and Bucky’s head nearly breaks his nose. But all in all, things are perfect. Bucky’s never felt so content.

Peggy is stern and abrupt and _surprising_. She’s not warm the way Steve is, preferring soft touches to words of praise outside of the bedroom, and she’s much more inclined to discipline him for the smallest slights. But he never doubts that he’s safe or cared for when he’s with her, and Peggy can take his breath away in seconds. Sometimes she’ll come to deliver a message and whisper unbelievably, wonderfully vile things in his ear just before she turns to go.

Once she steers him into a supply closet in a highly trafficked area, just around the corner from the office where Steve is meeting with Stark and Colonel Phillips. Ordering Bucky silent before he can ask what’s going on, Peggy slips her hand in his trousers and tugs until he’s shaking with need, biting through his lip to keep sounds from coming out. Then she abruptly pulls away, smiling sweetly, and tells him to get back to work.

Bucky’s pretty sure he’s in love with Peggy Carter.

Every time they’re together she teaches him something new about giving pleasure to a lady. He thinks he’s getting better at it because she’s never hesitant with admonishments, but as time goes by her reprimands in bed are less and less frequent. Steve keeps a picture of Peggy in his compass. She gives Bucky a handkerchief of hers like a token of affection from the legends of the Knights of the Round Table, even though in all the stories, it’s the subs who give such favors. It smells like her, like apple blossoms. He wears it against his chest.

And Steve is just...Steve. Project Rebirth didn’t change him, and neither did the fame of Captain America. He’s that scrawny kid from Brooklyn; all that’s different is that now the rest of the world can see how perfect he is too.

Steve’s as sweet to him as he can be when they’re in the field. Military training runs almost as deep as their biology and so Steve can’t walk around and attend to each of Bucky’s needs the way he would if they were home in Brooklyn. Bucky would protest if he tried; being the only sub in the Commandos, he can’t risk throwing off morale through any special treatment. He doesn’t want anyone to question his value.

But even on missions, Steve still finds ways to show his affection. He holds doors whenever there are doors to be held, helps Bucky in and out of transports. If they’re sharing rations and those rations need heating, Steve’s always the one to do it. It would be annoying, but Steve doesn’t do it because it’s expected that doms will attend to their submissives. He’s not trying to show anyone that he can keep his sub in place. It’s pure love and concern and Bucky’s a little overwhelmed every time he does it.

He knows that it tore Steve up inside back in Brooklyn, to be so sickly and frail and unable to do all the things expected of dominants. And while he never minded being the one to care for Steve, Bucky’s glad that the dynamic’s shifted because now Steve isn’t so hard on himself. Even if it’s a hell of a change to adjust to. The world’s so different than it was before that draft letter and sometimes Bucky can’t begin to respond to any of it.

Steve helps with that too. He’s not as forceful as Peggy. He doesn’t discipline as much as he guides. They’re little things, grounding things: a hand clamped across the back of Bucky’s neck, a grip that’s just bruising, a whispered word or even a hard look. Gestures so minor and instinctive that they never came up in any of Steve’s letters, where all their other encounters were outlined. Such small things that set the world right.

If the other Commandos have a problem serving with a sub, they don’t make it known. Bucky doubts that any of them do. They’re a ragtag bunch: a science experiment, a sub, two foreigners—one _French_ , Bucky can only guess at the shit Dernier gets for that—a Negro, a Japanese-American, and a man who lets himself be called Dum Dum. All they care about is whether or not Bucky can cover their asses, and Bucky’s a damn good shot.

And they’re good at working with a sub, the more time he spends with him. No one crowds him or takes their hands out of his line of sight if it’s at all avoidable. No one expects him to be subservient just because of his status. Every now and then, if Steve isn’t around and Bucky’s overwhelmed, one of the others will do something: grab his shoulder or order him to sit. Some innocuous, impersonal little action to put things right again. Bucky isn’t sure if it’s something Steve’s asked of them or if they figured it out by observation. Either way, he’s grateful.

“He’s damn lucky,” he overhears Morita says to Dum Dum one night, when they’ve made camp and they think Bucky’s asleep. “Rare enough to find a bondmate so young, and it turns out to be Captain America? Hell of a catch.”

Bucky doesn’t correct the assumption. Bond or not, he and Steve and Peggy are connected in every way that matters. Besides, if word gets out that the relationship is “lesser,” some assholes outside of the Commandos might decide Bucky’s fair game to harass or grope. There’s no shortage of chauvinism in the military. He feels guilty, hiding behind his dom that way, but half the time he’s being shot at and living off of rations that never fully quell the ache in his stomach, and the easy way out doesn’t sound so bad then. And anyway, the more he thinks on the lack of a bond, the more he worries Steve will grow tired of him and go off in search of true love.

“Would you want to marry Peggy?” Steve asks after they’ve destroyed another HYDRA base and Bucky chokes, thinking the day he’s dreaded has finally come.

He’s gagging into his canteen and Steve makes him sit, rubbing his back. “ _What_?” Bucky manages when he can finally speak.

Steve understands the problem immediately. He squeezes Bucky’s hand, draping a damp rag over the back of his neck, and doesn’t speak again until Bucky’s breathing settles. “Once the war’s over,” he explains, “and we can all live together. Polygamy’s illegal, Buck, unless you can prove a multiple bond. I figure one of us can marry you and then we can hire a lawyer to draw up all the same rights we can get for the other one.”

“And you want me to marry Mistress, Sir?” Bucky asks, voice small.

Steve cups his hands around Bucky’s face, thumbs stroking down his cheekbones as he presses their lips together. “I love you, Bucky. You know that. I just thought Peggy might like to dress up like a princess for a day, you know? I thought it’d be nice.”

Bucky imagines Peggy in lace and a veil, with her hands full of flowers. It would be nice.

Steve tells her as much when they’re back in London and Peggy laughs in their faces. “What a waste of money that would be. My parents eloped and bought themselves a house. That’s the most sensible plan, if you ask me.”

“We should have some sort of ceremony,” Steve protests. “Bucky’s family would be over the moon.”

They would. There were tears of relief in Bucky’s eyes when he was able to write and say he has two dominants now and Steve will never be sick another day in his life.

“If you must,” Peggy says. “I’ll attend, maybe even wear a white dress—a simple one—if it means so much to the pair of you. But that’ll be the whole of my participation. Less paperwork for two natural-born citizens to marry, anyway.”

“What about rings?” Steve asks, and Bucky thinks of how he used to linger in front of jewelry store windows when he took Bucky on walks. “We should have something to mark the engagement.”

“Don’t be a fool.” Peggy just shakes her head, smiling.

Steve may be a gentle dominant, but he’s still the most stubborn man Bucky’s ever met. “Do you like diamonds, Bucky?”

Diamonds. Bucky bites his lip at the thought of the cost. “I couldn’t ask you to spent that kind of money on me, Sir.”

“Buck,” Steve says sternly. “That’s not what I asked.”

“I like diamonds,” he admits, eyes downcast but a smile playing at his mouth.

“Then I’ll get you one once the war’s over,” Steve says. “The both of you.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Peggy says, but Steve’s pulling her into a hug and she’s laughing.

Their next mission has them waiting at a zip line.

Bucky asks, “Remember when you took me to Coney Island?”

He doesn’t remember much after that. There’s a pretty blue light that reminds him of Christmas, there’s snow, and there’s darkness. So much darkness. Sometimes the dark fades a little and the world hurts until it returns. He isn’t sure how long he floats aimlessly in blackness. He’s only sure that one day a voice says “Bucky,” and it’s a voice he knows.

He begins to stir. He feels off kilter, as though he’s lost something and can’t place what it is.

“Bucky,” the voice says again. “Sweet boy.” It’s said with a nice, almost musical accent.

He opens his eyes.

“Bucky, the procedure has already started.”


	4. These Wide-Eyed Fears

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case anyone was worried about the direction this story might take now that Bucky's been captured by HYDRA, let me assure you this fic will not go into non-con or even dub-con territory. It also will not feature forced bonding. The Soldier in this chapter is being lied to and told that he has bonded, but no actual bond has occurred.

The Soldier is very lucky.

He is surrounded by people who love him very much. They tell him this over and over, with soft words and gentle touches. “You’re so good for us,” they say, holding his hand or permitting him to rest his head on their laps. “You’re our sweet little soldier and we’ll never let you go. We’ll take care of you.”

And they take good care of him. The Soldier lost his arm but Sir gave him a new one. It is metal and shining and never gets tired, even when the flesh around it aches. The Soldier likes it very much and wishes his other arm could be as good, but he does not ask. It is not his place to make requests. He is meant to be grateful for what they allow him and he is. Sometimes he’s so grateful that tears spill down his face. They only smile and pet his hair and tell him that he’s perfect.

He likes to be perfect.

The Soldier belongs to Sir, but Sir’s job is very important and so he has a lot of helpers that the Soldier also answers to. They say the Soldier is the most helpful of all. His heart feels too large for his chest when they say that, heavy but not hurting.

They teach him to be an even better helper. The Soldier knows how to do a lot of what that they ask already, and he learns other things very fast. When he succeeds they stroke his hair or kiss his forehead. His favorite is when someone will encircle him in a hug from behind. He can’t move his arms that way, but it makes him feel so safe.

He doesn’t always understand what they want. Sometimes they ask strange questions. _What is your name?_ they’ll ask. _What happened to your arm? What were you before you became ours?_

The Soldier tries to tell them. He searches very, very deep inside his mind for the right answers, past all their lessons and kind words. But there’s only darkness before that, though if he strains very hard, he can remember wind and cold and screaming. The Soldier says as much before he falls into whimpering. He cannot give them what they want. He is failing them and he will be cast aside.

But they don’t cast him aside. They run their hands down his back and tell him that he’s wonderful. The Soldier doesn’t understand.

 _You’re a submissive,_ they explain. That means that he is naturally very sweet and helpful and good for them. But it also means that his body has a special function to make him even more useful. When he bonded to his Sir, they explain—somehow the Soldier knows that wind means bonding—his mind wiped away everything before that moment. So he wouldn’t have any distractions. He became a blank slate for his Sir’s needs.

So he doesn’t need a name. He only needs to listen, and the Soldier listens very well. That makes them smile, which makes him smile behind the mask they tell him to wear. It protects his pretty face.

Sometimes things hurt.

They will make him spar for hours and hours with no water and no rest. They take his clothes away and put him outside when it’s so cold his breath makes ice in the air, timing how long he can remain functional. Once they have him tread water until his body gives up and falls unconscious. The tasks are hard and exhausting and he wants—though he knows he shouldn’t—so badly to quit.

But they speak up whenever he thinks about it. _You’re doing so well,_ they say. _We need you to be good for us._ And the Soldier can’t disappoint them.

The most difficult things are the missions.

The Soldier is a wonderful shot. Everyone says so. There’s something soft and nice in his chest when he can hit a little target through his scope from over well over a thousand meters away. It makes everyone happy and he is glad to have succeeded. To be useful.

The missions that are up close are much less pleasant.

It’s not a matter of exertion. The Soldier is talented at slashing and hitting. He can kick a target straight through a wall without winding himself. They have trained him very well and it ought to be easy to fight for them.

It’s the targets that make it hard, yelling or crying. Sometimes begging. They don’t do that when he’s looking through a sight. It’s very distracting.

Everyone says thank you when he completes a mission. He’s allowed to lie down and they stroke his hair and stomach, give him water. They say a lot of words. His favorites are _valuable_ and _perfect_ and _good_. It helps, it does, but when they guide him back to the ice to rest, there’s still something sick and twisting deep in the pit of his stomach.

It’s lingering there when they wake him back up, heavy and cold inside him. There is another mission, another success, but over the course of it, the sickness is ever increasing within him. He has been bad, the Soldier thinks, even as they’re praising him. He must have been. Why else would he feel so broken? He is overwhelmed by their kindness and caresses; each soft touch is like floating on a cloud. The Soldier feels a rush of vertigo. The air is heavy and sweet and he can’t tell up from down.

There’s a hand on his and the Soldier jerks out because the hand is too gentle and it’s sending his mind spinning.

A scream and crunch. He sees bones and blood sticking out of a wrist and he wishes it were his.

“What are you doing?” someone screams.

The Soldier doesn’t know.

“Why did you do that? You were being so good!”

Silent, shaking, the Soldier draws in on himself. He is bad and he is broken. They will get rid of him and he will deserve it. He misses their hands now but he thinks he won’t be able to keep himself from hitting if they touch him again. No one tries.

Someone says “Get Doctor Zola,” and then there are footsteps running away. The Soldier whimpers. Now Sir will know how bad he’s being. What if Sir finds a way to break their bond?

“You have to behave, Soldier,” someone else says. “If you can’t behave yourself, we will stop loving you, do you understand? We’ll stop loving you.”

The Soldier is crying then, huddled on the floor, head resting against the cold tile. It ought to ground him. It doesn’t.

Sir is before him, frowning. The Soldier can’t help the pathetic whining sounds slipping out of his mouth. “What is wrong?” Sir asks softly. The Soldier flinches. He wishes Sir would shout.

Everything is wrong, but nothing ought to be. The Soldier doesn’t have the words for it. He hurts all over; it’s not a productive hurt like an injury sustained while fulfilling an objective. It’s not a settling hurt like the ache in his ribs after they revived him when he fainted while treading water. Every breath had stung then, but the sting had been a signal. _You’re alive,_ it said. _The test is over and you’re alive._

Now the world is soothing and enveloping and suffocating like... _like quicksand_ , the Soldier thinks, although he doesn’t know the word. He want their hands on him, but he wants them to bruise. To ground him. But that can’t be right; Sir always knows what he needs and Sir isn’t hurting him.

The Soldier yelps, wrapping his arms around himself.

“What is wrong, sweet boy?” Sir asks again.

The Soldier’s metal fingers are digging into his flesh arm. He tries to swallow and coughs because his throat is too dry. “Too much,” he rasps. It’s all he can manage. He doesn’t understand himself well enough to put the rest into words.

He stays curled up on the floor for a long time as they talk around him. He hears words like _overstimulation_ and _stress_ and _cognitive strain._ No one tells him again that he has been bad. No one tells him he’s been good either. The Soldier can’t say why, but that helps.

They lead him back to the ice. The Soldier had not realized his face was wet until the little trails of liquid freeze on his cheeks just before the rest of his body follows suit.

The next time they wake him up, they say it is not for a mission. The Soldier tenses, bile rising in his throat, and everybody steps back. This is it. He has misbehaved and they do not love him anymore. He is worthless and malfunctioning and they will throw him away. Probably Sir will take the arm back before that happens. The Soldier certainly doesn’t deserve it.

 _Don’t be afraid,_ they say. While he has slept, Sir has devised a new method to help the Soldier behave. They take him to a metal chair he’s never seen before. It is shiny and they say it is top of the line.

 _You have too many thoughts in your head,_ they explain. _Submissives are delicate and the strain of overtaxing your mind makes you lash out. This machine will take away the unnecessary thoughts and make you feel better._

The Soldier stares at the chair. He doesn’t understand how it will know to keep the things he needs to be able to help on his missions.

 _Be good for us and sit down,_ they say. _Don’t worry, Soldier, it won’t hurt you._

It does hurt, the Soldier finds, both during and for hours after, but it’s a good hurt. It has purpose and it helps him to tell up from down again. And after, when there are hands on him, the touches don’t make him sick now that they’re helping with the ache through his bones.

The Soldier smiles, grateful. His mind is empty and no one is angry with him. He cannot even remember why they were angry with him. The Soldier is loved and he is very lucky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Soldier forgot his life before his captivity prior to the chair's invention because of the head injury he sustained falling from the train, if that wasn't clear. I'm taking inspiration from the comics here: in the original Winter Soldier comic, Bucky had severe brain damage and total amnesia when the Russians recovered him. Zola did use his name at the end of the last chapter, but he was just waking up after a lot of trauma and it didn't stick in the long term.


	5. A World with No More Night

The Winter Soldier can be a real pain in the ass. 

STRIKE Team Alpha gets a lot of shit, and Rumlow’s earned more than his fair share of bruises defending it. It’s one of the only mixed STRIKE teams, with a male sub and a female switch. Two female switches, on missions when the Widow assists. The jeering Rumlow overhears in the locker rooms about “bitches playing commandos” and “leading a team of pussies” is as pathetic as it is infuriating. What century are these idiots living in? SHIELD’s been fully integrated since its founding. 

He’d be able to laugh it off if the digs were just directed at him. Rumlow’s the best damn team lead STRIKE’s ever had, ask anyone. But Murphy and Anders are well worth their salt and he’ll shatter skulls before he hears a word to mock them. Why beautiful women or subs would want all the strain of serving on a special ops team is beyond Rumlow, but as long as they can pull their weight, he doesn’t give a shit about status or gender. And it’s not as if Murphy or Anders ask for special treatment. 

The Soldier’s a different story. 

Of course, the Soldier can’t _ask_ for anything, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t protocols. Protocols, as Pierce is so fond of reminding Rumlow, that were developed by the Soldier’s own bondmate and so cannot be deviated from in any circumstance. And generally Rumlow doesn’t have a problem following procedure, but it’s so damn pathetic. 

The Winter Soldier’s a marvel in the field and Rumlow will never forget the way Murphy’s face lit up when he realized that HYDRA’s greatest soldier was also a sub. But the Soldier’s a submissive from the days of old, back when society didn’t trust the poor bastards to do anything more strenuous than housekeeping without risking hysteria. He’s the world’s greatest weapon, but without constant coddling and praise he collapses into a teary heap. 

He’s a walking stereotype, a caricature who seems pulled right out of some TV ad from the seventies. “When a sub’s at the wheel, Polyglas means more than mileage” and that kind of crap. What Rumlow wouldn’t give sometimes to reach out and grab the Soldier by his pretty, pale throat. Just _shake_ him until he stops sniveling and cringing and acts like the brutal killing machine he is on the field. 

Rumlow finally snaps on a mission outside Odessa. 

The target is a nuclear engineer being escorted by the goddamn Black Widow. As if Rumlow’s stress levels weren’t high enough because of that, their carefully laid plans begin to fall apart from the second the team moves out. The target was never meant to reach his ride out of the country, and yet the bastard’s reached the fucking Ukraine before the Soldier shoots out his tires. 

The mission’s salvaged. If the Widow survives the slug that the Soldier put through her, it’ll be through sheer dumb luck. But Rumlow’s trembling with pent-up tension, teeth grinding, and the Soldier’s curled up on the floor of the transport making wounded noises. Rumlow can’t take it. 

Rollins is sitting beside the Soldier, stroking his fingers down the asset’s pale face. “You’re all right, sweetheart,” Rollins murmurs. “You’ve been so good for us. We couldn’t have done it without you.” The second in command has the patience of a saint and Rumlow tends to leave the praises up to him because sweet talk only naturally flows from the commander’s lips when he’s trying to coax a pretty little sub into bed. 

But the Soldier’s still making those damn sounds and enough is enough. Rumlow bolts up from the bench, fists clenched. “Give me a minute with him.” 

“Brock,” Rollins says. He never calls Rumlow by his first name during missions, but he’s not using his mission voice now. Or the soothing tone he’s been whispering at the Soldier. No, this is his “don’t be a fucking idiot” voice, the same one he uses when he’s dragging Rumlow away from bar fights or shoving him toward a couch when he’s had too many drinks. Usually it makes Rumlow smile a little, albeit after much bitching. Today it makes him seethe. 

“That wasn’t a request,” he snaps, and Rollins reluctantly shuffles back, taking a seat along the wall. 

The Soldier stares up with wet, pathetic eyes and Rumlow grabs his trembling right hand, squeezing hard. “Calm down,” he orders. It’s not sweetly said. The only kind thing about it is that he didn’t shout. Behind him, Rumlow can hear Rollins’s hissed intake of breath. They’ve seen the Soldier lash out before, they’ve cleaned up the mangled bodies. But Rumlow cannot fucking take it. 

And the Soldier settles. Just like that, the whimpering stops. 

For a second, Rumlow can only register that he’s still alive. Then the silence strikes him. He gapes, and the Soldier is staring right back. There’s something like relief mingling with the confusion in those blue eyes. 

“Sit up,” Rumlow says, loosening his grip. It’s still firm, but it shouldn’t be painfully so. 

The Soldier sits, docile as a service dog. 

“Good boy,” Rumlow manages, pulling away before his luck runs out. 

As he moves back to his seat, the Soldier’s fingers twitch a little, but he remains still and silent, gaze steady on the floor. Rumlow just stares. So the delicate little flower can withstand a little bit of force. In that moment, Rumlow almost doesn’t hate him. 

Once they return to base, Rumlow’s stepping out of the van, composing his mission report in his head, when something big and heavy slams him into the side of the vehicle. 

It’s Rollins, wide-eyed and breathless. He grabs Rumlow by the shoulders, shaking him a little. “You just manhandled the _Winter Soldier_.”

“Uh, yeah?” Rumlow isn’t sure whether to shove his way free or let Rollins work through whatever fit this is. “It worked, didn’t it?”

“The Winter fucking Soldier,” Rollins says. “You—Brock, you _idiot_ , you’ve seen what he does. What the fuck were you thinking?” 

“I was thinking all that whining was giving me a goddamn migraine.” Rumlow pushes ineffectively against Rollins’s broad shoulders. “I don’t need you second guessing my calls and I’ve got a report to deliver, so get out of the—”

It’s not a kiss, not really. Rollins just slams his mouth against Rumlow’s, gripping his arms with trembling hands. “You fucking idiot,” he mumbles against Rumlow’s lips and before Rumlow can respond, he’s doing it again.

It takes far too long for Rumlow to realize he’s kissing right back. 

They stay that way for God knows how long, panting into each other’s mouths, kissing until their lips swell. It’s more a struggle than it is a show of affection. Each time they pull away to breathe, Rollins will call him a fucking idiot and Rumlow will murmur that he’ll fucking show him, but he doesn’t. He only draws Rollins back in.

Until Rollins says, “I’ll put you on your knees ‘til you learn some fucking sense,” and Rumlow squirms free. 

They’re both dominants. He’s always known that, but now the knowledge shocks him like an ice bath. They can’t fit together. And Rollins looks away, wiping at his mouth, because he’s realized as much himself. 

But. Rumlow licks his reddening lips. They’ll find a way to make it fit. They have to. 

Three years later, and they’re about to give up. 

Jack, as Brock had long suspected and confirmed shortly after the Odessa mission, doesn’t give a damn about sex. Brock had hoped that would make things easier, and how painfully naive that was, in retrospect. Being dominant means so much more than holding a body down in bed. It colors _everything_ , every last insignificant detail that means the whole world now that they’re trying to make themselves fit. 

Brock tries submitting to Jack. Jack tries playing submissive in return. It’s like trying to shoot a target with all the guns in the world but no way to load the fucking bullets. 

They coax Murphy into bed with them, inappropriate workplace relations be damned. Brock needs someone to take in hand, to guide and to mark up so that everyone will know they’re his. And Jack, Jack may have no desire to stick his dick in anything, but he loves to watch people squirm, tutting sympathetically through his smirk as they go to pieces. Murphy, a single submissive and already a member of their team, makes perfect sense. 

In theory.

In practice, all Murphy’s stamina and snark on the field and in the Triskelion evaporates in the bedroom. A single harsh word can plummet his mood for days after. Outside of sex and work, Murphy’s as submissive as they could ever ask, but it feels like ordering around a sibling, not a lover. 

When Murphy admits that he’s met someone, Brock and Jack pat his back, ruffle his hair, and send him on his way. 

They spent a full year vetting other subs. Acquaintances, old flames, submissives they find online. None of them ever send the same thrill up Brock’s spine as when he kisses Jack, and he knows Jack feels the same way. 

Jack finds an article on some blog about vanilla couples who don’t let their status have any role in their relationships. They’re desperate enough to try even that, but denying their biology isn’t any better than letting it clash. 

Brock’s never been one to back away from a fight, but even he’s beginning to wonder if this isn’t an exercise in futility. 

Then comes a mission in Estonia. 

Their intel is bad, which turns a simple sabotage into a damn bloodbath. Murphy takes a shot to the arm and Anders drags him back to their safe house. Heller and Ejiofor, two agents on loan from STRIKE Team Bravo, end up choking on their own blood in the dirt. 

If they make it out of this alive, Brock swears, he has to let Jack go. He’s been holding the man back from any chance at true happiness to satisfy his own desires. Jack deserves love and if Brock can’t give it to him, he has to set him free. Even if it fucking kills him. 

Maybe it would be better if the mission kills Brock first. 

But it doesn’t. The Soldier manages to save their asses, staggering back to them covered in more blood than a horror movie prom queen. He sinks into the mud, hands pressed to his side, and when Jack soothes them away to examine the injury, Brock’s holding his breath, sure the Soldier’s guts are about to spill out. 

They don’t, but the gash in the Soldier’s abdomen would be fatal to anyone without his enhanced healing abilities. It’s still going to be a bitch to clean out. “Soldier,” Brock says, while Jack dabs at the wound. He doesn’t bother to be soft. He’s too drained and anyway, over the years the Soldier’s been responding positively to Brock’s rougher methods as employed away from the higher-ups. “Can you walk on your own?” 

The Soldier shakes his head. Heller’s gasping in the dirt, but the asset takes priority. 

“Come on,” Brock says, sliding the Soldier’s right arm over his shoulder. Jack’s still applying pressure to the wound on the other side, easing the Soldier up in the process. “It’s gonna be a long walk, but you can make it.”

The Soldier doesn’t speak. Brock reaches up and takes the hand dangling over his shoulder, intending to improve the leverage. 

And suddenly there’s light. 

The light is emanating from under the cuff of Brock’s sleeve, from the skin of his hand, glowing at the junction of his and the Soldier’s fingers so brightly that Brock has to turn his head. The light is growing, flooding through the vents in the Soldier’s mask, spilling white rays from under Jack’s hand where there had previously been red fluid. It’s radiating from Jack as well; Rumlow can see the blood circulating through his second in command’s face, only it isn’t blood now. It’s pure sunlight. It should be blinding, but Brock can take in every detail. 

There’s a painless wave of force through their bodies. The Soldier is shaking violently between them, but he’s in no danger of falling. Brock’s hand might as well be fused to his. He somehow knows Jack’s hold is the same way; he can almost _hear_ Jack think it.

He feels everything. Absolutely everything. Confusion and contentment and horror and joy. Brock’s mouth has fallen open, though no noise comes out. He’s not sure if he would be laughing or crying were he capable of making sounds. 

The Soldier’s eyes are wide, darting. Brock can _taste_ his fear, a coppery, chemical flavor scraping at the back of his own throat. It’s a vast, dark thing clawing around the Soldier’s mind and Brock squeezes his hand even tighter beyond the involuntary clench that accompanied the light. He tries to force more of the glow into the Soldier’s body, willing the calm into their submissive. Jack, he knows, is doing the same, though they haven’t spoken.

But the Soldier’s knees are buckling, eyes rolling, and as the light fades their bondmate slumps unconscious between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "When a [woman's] at the wheel, Polyglas means more than mileage." Look upon [this vintage commercial,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td6m3OhO5zE) ye mighty, and despair. ~~And then imagine it recut with the Winter Soldier driving.~~
> 
> I'm not saying that the Winter Soldier is crying on the floor after the Odessa mission because he vaguely remembers Natasha from the Red Room, but I'm not saying that he's _not_.
> 
> Anders is a character who's appeared in seven of my previous fics: _[International House of Stockholm](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2195529), [All Mine (You Have to Be)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2257455)_ , _[And All The Good You've Done (Will Soon Be Swept Away)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2376467/chapters/5249111)_ , _[Some Plans Are Stupid](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2434808)_ , [_You Only Want to Socialize (But I Don't Think We Should),_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2460149) _[The Better to Hug You With](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2523368)_ , and [_The Annual HYDRA Thanksgiving Potluck._](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2650307) She is the invention of [bofurrific](http://archiveofourown.org/users/bofurrific/pseuds/bofurrific), first appearing in her fic _[Brock Rumlow doesn't need transphobic pieces of shit on his team](http://orderthroughpain.tumblr.com/post/90712441920/brock-doesnt-need-transphobic-pieces-of-shit-on)_. She appears here as always with bofurrific's permission.


	6. To Hold Me and to Hide Me

It hurts. 

The light’s gone, the wind settling around them, and it fucking _hurts_. The Soldier was heavy enough while conscious, and now his dead weight is pulling Brock to his knees. There’s a flare of pain through Brock’s side as though he’s twenty-two again, waking up in the barracks with a burst appendix. He’s hyperventilating.

There’s a wet gurgling sound to his left. Heller. He’s alive, panting, and his eyes are soaked with tears yet still perceiving.

Brock jerks away. Tension coursing through his body as he does, his hand falls back instantly, clenching at the air, reaching out for his submissive. No, _the Soldier_. No, _his._

He grabs his gun and aims at Heller’s head. They say anyone close enough to a bond as it forms is filled with pure bliss for up to a full minute. Brock wouldn’t know; he’s never been close enough. Vaguely, he hopes Heller’s minute isn’t up. The man was a decent teammate, might as well ease his passing.

_Click._

The gun’s fucking empty. Not that Brock could have blown Heller’s brains out even if it weren’t. The pistol’s almost slipping from his hands, he’s shaking so badly. He can’t aim for shit.

Brock doesn’t reload. He shoves Heller face-first in the mud and holds him there until well after the struggling’s stopped. Ejiofor’s long dead and so are the mercs who were sent to stop them. There are no other witnesses. They’re safe.

Jack, pale and perfect and Brock’s _bondmate_ , is pulling the Winter Soldier into his arms. The Soldier’s still out. Even unconscious, there’s tension tugging at his brow and his body’s stiff, curled up around the injury. Jack is pressing his own trembling hands back against the wound. He’s having a panic attack. Brock knows because he’s having it too. He hasn’t had one since high school, when he blew all he’d saved for that month’s overdue rent on bailing his old man from jail. Up until now he’d never felt that helpless again, not even with a gun in his face.

“Jack,” he tries to say, but all that comes out is a rasping, wordless croak.

Their eyes meet. Jack’s got tear trails through the dirt on his face, but his smile is genuine. Brock can feel it.

He can feel _Jack_.

They’re bonded. The realization doesn’t stop the fear racing through Brock’s blood, but it does force it to the backseat. _Bonded_. After all this time.

Brock hauls himself up on legs shakier than a newborn fawn’s and stumbles over to his bondmate. He’s crying. Whether it’s from relief or love or sheer panic, Brock can’t say. The most thought he spares to it is wiping his face clean before he kisses Jack. It’s perfect. It’s the best fucking kiss of his life. It’s—

“We need to get him out of here.” Jack tilts his head away, looking down at the Soldier cradled in his arms. “We have to patch him up while he’s still out or he’ll be even more afraid when he wakes up.”

And the Soldier _is_ afraid. They say the sub’s emotions are the strongest just after the bonding so that the doms will know how to care for them following the stress of the event. Most of Rumlow’s own panic is from the Soldier, rolling off him in waves that threaten to pull the dominants under. How can someone be so afraid while he’s unconscious?

Brock doesn’t know how they make it back to the safe house. One minute they’re all huddled on the bloodied ground and the next they’re carrying the Soldier through the threshold, trying to brush off Anders’s questions.

“What happened? You look like hell,” she says, as they’re laying the Soldier down in one of the bedrooms.

“We carried out the mission.” Brock tries to steel his voice, but he can hear the quaver through it. “The—the asset’ll be fine, we’ll take care of it. Just...keep an eye on Murphy, will you? The Soldier can lash out when he’s injured, no sense in giving him more targets. If HQ comes over the radio, tell them we lost Heller and Ejiofor.”

Anders stares a few seconds too long, but she goes without protest. They can hear every step she takes because the floorboards creak so badly. She’s not lingering by the door; she’s gone upstairs.

Jack’s already opened the Soldier’s vest. He slips his knife through the sweater the Soldier wears under the body armor, parting it down the center and pulling it back from the wound.

He’s dousing the gash with alcohol when Brock speaks.

“Maybe they can find a way to break it.”

“What?”

“The bond,” Brock says. The intensity of the initial connection is fading; he’s not wild with fear anymore. It’s still there, nagging in the pit of his stomach, and he’s shaking from the strain the mission put on all their bodies, but he can think again. “Not—not for us. But the Soldier—maybe they can just...just cut it out. I mean, they take his memories, right? His emotions? Maybe...”

He trails off. Jack was mopping up the blood around the injury site, but now his hand has stilled.

“And—for all we know, just the chair and cryo could cancel it out, right? Like wiping a hard drive. We’d still be okay, Jack, I know we’d be okay, and we could—”

That’s as far as he gets before the back of Jack’s hand slams across his face. Brock staggers from the blow, ears ringing, eyes watering up. He doesn’t feel it. All he can feel is the flare of disgust from Jack. It hurts more than the slap ever could.

“Do you hear yourself, Brock Rumlow?” Jack has to force his hand down as if it takes all he has not to backhand Brock a second time. Rather than resume cleaning the wound, he sits on the bed beside the Soldier, drawing the submissive back into his arms as he had in the field. “This is our submissive. _Your_ submissive. ‘Not for us’? He is us. Without him, there couldn’t _be_ an us. You—you idiot. If we tell anyone about this, we’ll either end up dead for interfering with the Soldier’s functioning, or we’ll become captives too, incentives for him to behave. And you thought—you _selfish_ —what are you, a fucking deadbeat? We have to take care of him. He’s ours.”

But he can’t be. If the Soldier is theirs, then that means they’re bonded to someone who won’t even remember them, who they’ll be able to see and hold for handful of days each year. If that. Someone who’ll stay forever young in ice while they die and leave him alone. Above all, it means that the thing they’ve bonded to is a living, suffering _person_ rather than a machine with human parts. A person they’ve helped to imprison.

The Soldier can’t be theirs.

Brock tries to swallow, but it’s as though his throat is full of glass shards. “I—I can’t—”

And one of Jack’s hands is darting off of the Soldier again. Brock tenses himself for another hit, but instead Jack grabs him by the back of the neck, pulling him forward. “Fucking _look_ at him,” he orders, and even though Brock’s a dom too, he can’t help but obey. “And stitch him up. It’s the least we can do and my hands are too shaky.”

He looks. The Soldier’s still in the mask. The upper half of his face is streaked with blood. It’d be so easy to see a mindless weapon, but Brock can feel his heartbeat without even touching him. And then Jack’s unhooking the muzzle and Brock bites through his lip.

The Winter Soldier’s never looked so damn young. Brock’s never let himself see the youth beneath the mask and the stubble. He’s blood-drenched, gutted, and the scar tissue where metal prosthetic fuses on is on full display.

Brock doesn’t see any of that. All he sees are the Soldier’s flesh fingers winding into Rollins’s shirt, reaching out to his doms even in his sleep. All he hears is the Soldier’s heartbeat. And all he can feel is the pain of the chair and the ice and everything else they’ve made their sub suffer through. _It isn’t even good pain,_ he thinks, without knowing what he means.

And then Brock’s on the bed with them, combing his fingers so carefully through the Soldier’s matted hair. He’s murmuring wordlessly, soothingly. It doesn’t feel cloying and patronizing like the maintenance phrases. What it feels is woefully inadequate after all they’ve done to the poor bastard.

“We have to take him and run,” Jack says.

Brock snaps his head up, though he can’t keep himself from carding through the Soldier’s hair. “What?”

“We have to run.” Jack’s gone chalky white. He looks like hell. Brock can only imagine what his own face is like. “The things that they’ll do to him—that we _let_ them do, the things we did—we can take the van and—”

“Jack.”

“Or we can—fuck, we’ll go back and get money and weapons and plan it out and, I don’t know, storm in and take him or—”

“Jack.”

“—we could wait for the next mission, maybe, the ice can’t break the bond, it can’t and we’ll be able to—”

“Jack!” He shouts and he hates himself for it. Overhead the floorboards creak, but the sound is far off. Anders isn’t heading their way. “We can’t take him.”

Jack’s staring at him and Brock has to turn away, has to force himself to see nothing past their submissive’s bloody hair, because this is already too painful without the betrayal on Jack’s face.

“He’s _ours._ You want to take him back to—”

“You know I don’t want to.” Brock tilts his head back. Tears are welling in his eyes again. He can’t let them out. If he cries now he won’t be able to stop; he’ll just bawl like a child until there’s nothing left but a dried out husk. Why the Soldier? Is this some cosmic joke, some punishment for all their sins? Then why drag an innocent, tortured submissive into it? “No one ever leaves HYDRA, Jack. You know what they do to the people who run.”

There’s a sound, a start of a protest, but Jack cuts himself off.

“We—we don’t know how to take care of him. Even a bond can’t fix decades of brainwashing overnight. He’ll get erratic, he might even blame us for it or try and seek the familiar back out. HYDRA would find us. Who would we go to? SHIELD? HYDRA _is_ SHIELD. At best, we’d be locked up, separated. You said it yourself: if they find out we’ve bonded, they’ll kill us. Try and cut the bond out of his brain. The only way anyone gets outta HYDRA’s in a fucking box, Jack.”

There’s a stretch of silence. Jack is trying to think of arguments. Brock can feel the gears winding in his head, like Jack’s trying to pull out worms crawling beneath his skin, but each one he unearths comes up dead. Finally he sits back, defeated, resting his hand on the Soldier’s thigh. “Then what do we do?”

“Insight,” Brock says, hating himself for it.

“What?”

“Project Insight,” Brock says. “They say it’s, what, two years off? Three? They won’t need the Soldier after that.” Jack’s opening his mind, starting to protest, and Brock charges on. “If we go to Pierce then, when they have no need for him, if we tell him the truth—he’ll have no reason to keep the Soldier from us. If he knows we were loyal all that time, he’ll—fuck, even Pierce isn’t completely heartless.”

“Three years.” Jack’s knuckles are white on the Soldier’s leg, but the sub doesn’t stir. “Three years. You want to just sit back for three years and—”

“It’s not about what I want, Jack.” Brock isn’t crying, but that doesn’t keep him from wiping compulsively at his face. “It’s about surviving.”

And for a long time they’re just silent, hopeless.

“I hate this,” Jack says.

Brock’s combed the tangles from all the Soldier’s hair as if that makes it any less of bloody mess. “Hell of a way to form a bond.”

“They said Zola was his bondmate,” Jack mutters, as if it makes a difference now.

“Zola’s dead.”

The Soldier doesn’t stir; he goes from fast asleep to bolt upright. Then he curls around his injury, forgotten during their planning, trembling like he doesn’t know whether to lean into their touches or pull away. His eyes are wild, frightened.

“Soldier!” Brock’s voice is harsher than he intends and to compensate he lays a hand over the Soldier’s. The man tenses but doesn’t strike out. “Winter. Calm down.”

And the order, as Brock can feel, is like an anchor on rough water.

“Don’t be afraid of us.” Now that the Soldier’s settled, however slightly, Jack’s stroking down the submissive’s spine. “You don’t have to be afraid of us ever again, sugar. We’re gonna take care of you from now on. We’re bonded, do you know what that means?”

And there’s another flare of panic. The Soldier’s scrambling back and Brock grabs his arm, holds firmly. “Breathe. Breathe, babe. Tell us what’s wrong, Winter. We can help you, but we have to know what’s wrong, you understand?”

“The Secretary is my Sir.” His voice is wrecked, cracking on each syllable, as if his newly bonded body can’t bring itself to recite the programming burned in his mind. “My first Sir told me.” Then he draws in on himself, expecting a blow for arguing.

But all that happens is Jack leans in and kisses his cheek.

“The Secretary...Pierce is like everyone’s Sir,” Brock says. He’s still holding the Soldier’s arm. “At least for a little while longer. We’ll explain everything, all right? But first we need to stitch you up.”

And Winter tenses again. Brock has a thought, sudden and crystal clear: _It is wrong to damage HYDRA’s property. It invites punishment._

“We’ll give you something for the pain,” Jack says. “You won’t feel it, sugar, all right? We’ve got local anesthesia—just tell us when you’re numb and—”

“He wants the pain,” Brock says. Because he does. Jack doesn’t protest, which means he feels it too. “Don’t you, Winter?”

Winter’s eyes dart between them. He’s not allowed to want anything.

“Answer me.” Brock’s free hand goes to Winter’s stomach, rubbing in circles, far from his injury. “You’ll never be in trouble for answering us. We know that you want to be good.”

“It makes things right,” Winter says. “When it hurts.”

And Brock had suspected that ever since the day he first grabbed the Soldier’s hand on the transport. Which means Zola was never a bondmate of the Soldier’s, or corrective force would have been in the maintenance procedures. The poor sub’s been deprived of the stability he craves for ages and tortured on top of it. Brock swallows back his bile, tries not to remember his own part in the suffering.

“We’ll make it right,” Brock promises. “We’ll make you feel better.”

“You need to pick a safe word.” Jack’s hands are steady now and he’s retrieved the first aid kit, threading the needle. “That’s a word you can say to us if the pain gets to be too much. If anything’s overwhelming you, ever, and you say it to the two of us, we’ll stop and help you, all right?”

Winter is quiet, eyes downcast. Brock can feel his confusion. He isn’t sure if it’s the concept of controlling the situation that has their submissive so bewildered or just picking a word. Rumlow’s about to supply him with one just so they can get to stitching him up when Winter finally speaks. “Coney.”

His eyes are blank and they don’t try to coax a meaning from him. Jack begins the stitches and Winter tenses, but he breathes a long sigh, leaning into the prick of the needle.

“You’re so good,” they assure him. “You’re holding so still for us. You’re taking it so well.” And Winter sighs, bites his lip, and squeezes the bedding with his fingers, letting his eyes flutter shut. The emotions from him are no longer pure horror, are as content as he’s likely ever been in his life. Brock loses himself in it, leaning closer, nuzzling against the Soldier’s cheek.

“You’re such a good boy,” he breathes, letting the hand rubbing Winter’s stomach slip lower until it grazes the waistband of his pants. “I’ll make you feel good, babe, I’ve got you—”

And Jack grabs his wrist before he can slip his hand under the canvas fabric.

Brock stares, startled. Winter’s rigid between them, radiating fear again. Something’s wrong and their sub instinctively assumes it’s him.

“We can’t,” Jack says flatly. “He can’t consent.”

“But we can feel—”

“He’s not in his right mind, Brock.” Jack’s guiding his hand away. “It doesn’t matter what he feels, not when the power balance is so fucked. We can’t, not while we’re HYDRA’s. I won’t let that happen to him.”

And Brock doesn’t even try to argue, because Jack’s right.

“Have I been bad?” Winter whispers, still so stiff, and they assure him he’s good, planting kisses on his hair and forehead and stroking their hands down his sides.

When they return to base, everyone’s frenzied, racing up and down the halls and speaking in hushed whispers. Brock and Jack only learn of the reason for the chaos once Winter’s back in cryo. Captain America’s alive, they say, found frozen but living, buried in ice.

They don’t stay and join the speculation of what this means for HYDRA. They trudge back to their apartment, trying to ignore the frost at one end of their bond, and pile on the blankets.

No matter how high they turn up the heat, they can’t get warm.


	7. No More Talk of Darkness

A closed bond is like an open wound.

It never stops tugging at them, as ever present as the cold clinging to their bones. The loss is as sharp months later as it was when Winter first went back under the ice. Brock will just be sitting there and the absence will strike him, like a tongue stumbling over the gap where there was once a tooth. He never really stops sensing it, but sometimes it’s a dull ache in the background and sometimes it’s so crushing he can hardly bear to move.

There are charities and counseling organizations just for people with dead bondmates, to try and curb the suicides and rapid health declines that usually accompany the loss. Brock’s never been one to think bonds are some heavenly arrangement, but he has to wonder if there wasn’t a divine hand insuring that the Soldier bonded with two dominants at once. Had it just been Brock, he thinks the shock of Winter’s return to the ice might have killed him.

They’re both on antidepressants, and Brock’s prescribed blood pressure medications as well. Jack has to go on sleeping pills and see a shrink for the stomach pains they thought were ulcers before the doctors called them psychosomatic. And their heating bills are through the fucking roof.

Eight months after they’ve bonded, Winter’s revived for another mission.

Pierce is there and that’s not standard procedure. The techs handle the thawing and Rumlow covers the mission briefing. That’s the way it’s always done. Brock wants to squeeze Jack’s hand, but the risk of drawing attention to themselves is too high. What if Pierce suspects? What if something in the body scans or the data from the chair registered the bond, and they’re about to be made example of?

Winter’s always shivering and boneless when he comes out of the tank. He huddles on the floor, dripping with slush, and Brock has to clamp his teeth down on his tongue to keep from running to his submissive. Blood floods through his mouth. It’s warm. _He’s_ warm for the first time in months, though his body is still trembling out of sympathy.

Pierce sends one of the technicians to dry Winter off. The man is a new hire, small and frail enough that Winter could snap him in half without even trying. The tech seems to realize this; he’s shaking even worse than Winter. Brock’s eyes narrow and, beside him, Jack leans forward. This has to be a test. Is this scrawny little scientist about to get his head torn off for disloyalty?

Winter’s docile at first, as still as he can be as the tech runs the towel over him. But then he stiffens, raising his head and meeting the man’s eyes. The technician goes rigid and Winter winds a hand through his mousy blond hair before shoving him away, frowning. He’s still then, but Brock can sense his confusion. He can’t hear Winter’s thoughts, but he still knows what they are. _I am not yours. I am not for you._

The ice and the chair couldn’t weaken the bond. And Brock knew that—he’s been sensing Winter’s frozen heartbeat for months—but to _feel_ his submissive search for him after all this time is like stepping back on land after a voyage at sea.

The tech bites back a whimper and damn near pisses himself. Pierce just smiles, orders everyone to get back to work, and turns for the door. “Keep a close watch on him, Agent Rumlow. I want a full report of any irregularities.”

The door’s shut behind him by the time Winter’s eyes fall on Brock and Jack. He rushes to them, still dripping icy water in his wake. Brock can feel Anders and Murphy’s eyes on their backs as they dry their submissive, explaining the mission while they heat him up, but Winter’s here and they’re _whole_ , and he doesn’t give a damn what anyone else thinks.

It’s a simple mission: a cleanup after the Chitauri invasion. Some of the agents the Asgardian brainwashed were HYDRA, and so some of the supplies offered up to help build his portal were HYDRA property. They’ve been sent to retrieve their belongings from scavengers. It’s too simple of a mission for the Soldier, yet they’re getting check-in calls from HQ every hour.

It ought to make Brock and Jack paranoid as hell. But Winter is awake and all theirs for three whole days, and they can’t bring themselves to care about anything else.

When they return to base, Winter follows Pierce without hesitation for the debriefing. He submits quietly to all the hugging and petting, lets Pierce wipe the makeup from his face without struggle. His orders run deep; Brock can feel that now. And he can feel that Winter wants to look back at them, but he doesn’t. They told him that he couldn’t. Their submissive is so obedient, he didn’t even ask why.

The techs report that the Soldier’s heart rate is perfectly level. Pierce smiles, looking far more content than they’d anticipated given all the check-ins, and sends Winter back to the cryo-tank.

Once he’s frozen and that awful cold is creeping through Brock and Jack’s blood again, Pierce informs them of their newest assignment. They’re to serve with Steve Rogers, effectively immediately. They’re to gain his trust.

As far as assignments go, it’s enjoyable.

At least, Brock thinks so. He doesn’t even need the bond to know Jack doesn’t feel the same way, scowling when Rogers isn’t looking and rolling his eyes whenever their new team lead gets going on some Captain America speech.

“He’s a threat,” Jack snaps in the showers after one mission. Cap saved his life on the field, so Jack’s in an especially foul mood. “He could destroy everything we’ve worked for, Brock. If Insight fails, we’ll never be able to free Winter.”

“He’s just one man,” Brock protests, shutting off the water. Military training’s made them both quick when it comes to grooming, but now that every shower feels freezing, they’ve become even faster. Once Winter is theirs forever, Brock’s going to introduce him to the wonders of long, hot bubble baths. “He can’t stop us.”

And besides, Cap is _nice_. Just a genuinely friendly, all around decent guy. It’s a real shame that they’re on opposite sides. Brock would have liked to be able to introduce Cap to Winter once all is said and done. The next time Winter’s awake and Brock watches him racing around the field, barking orders in Russian and gutting opponents like tissue paper, he imagines the super soldiers sparring each other and goes a little starry-eyed.

Winter’s so dominant when he’s fighting; it’s intoxicating to watch. Brock go weak in the knees at the sight, pride burning through him to watch their sub take such control. Jack swings Winter into his arms bridal-style once he returns to them, pressing kisses against the mask as he carries him back to their transport. Murphy and Anders only grin and say they’ll give them some privacy back at the safe house.

Murphy and Anders, Brock’s sure, have worked it out. They’re not stupid and Brock and Jack aren’t subtle. But the STRIKE team is a family and he knows his subordinates would rather die than report them.

They draw a bath for Winter at the safe house and scrub the grime from him. Sinking down in the water, eyes shut, Winter lets out little contented sighs and smiles as the washing tugs on his hair. They leave him to dry himself off and Brock tries to ignore the erection straining against his tac-pants. Jacking off while Winter’s conscious would edge too close to taking advantage; he’d be able to feel it through the bond.

Winter steps out of the bathroom fully dressed as Brock’s tugging his shirt off, changing out of his combat gear. Winter’s hands trail on Brock’s wrists, blocking him from putting on another shirt and worrying at the scar tissue from all the missions over the years. “Are you hurt, Sir?”

“Not anymore,” Brock assures him.

Winter keeps tracing the scars, enraptured. His own body is flawless, save for the marring where his prosthetic attaches. Walking his fingers across the little welt left from Brock’s appendectomy, Winter tilts his head. “What happened?”

“That one’s from surgery. C’mere, babe.” Brock takes his sub’s hands and guides him to the bed. He means for them to sit side by side, but Winter slides down to the floor, resting his head on Brock’s knee. “I’ll tell you about any scar you want. They’ve all got a story.”

Winter taps them one at a time, carefully considering before each touch. At first, Brock’s honest. “Molotov cocktail in Slovenia. Mission in Kuwait. Bar fight in Jersey.”

But thinking of his scars gets him thinking of his missions. Thinking of Winter’s missions. They have no way of knowing if their submissive ever volunteered for this life. Pierce had said the Soldier offered to be reformed into a weapon to aid Zola, but Pierce is a proven fucking liar. The truth could well be that their sub was forced into this, twisted through torture and programming from the gentle creature cuddling on Brock’s lap into a brutal killing machine.

HYDRA had sounded so damn appealing while Brock was in the military, watching his friends shipped home in caskets. A little lying and loss of freedoms to save lives had sounded so good in comparison. In theory, it still does. But looking at Winter, nuzzled against Brock’s thigh, doomed to go back to ice—there’s nothing in the world that can justify what’s been done to their bondmate.

But there’s no leaving HYDRA either. And if they die, Winter will be left all alone and disposed of like a sick dog once his use is up. Brock swallows and tries to steady himself.

“What’s this one, Sir?” Winter runs his metal hand over an old war wound, and Brock smiles.

“Got bit playing with my neighbor’s dog. Back in high school.”

“Does it still hurt?” Winter asks, and Brock cringes inside. Does Winter’s shoulder still pain him? Scar tissue feels tight in the cold, and there’s so much there, and Winter sleeps in ice...

“No,” Brock says. “I don’t feel a thing.”

“Here, sugar.” Jack comes in; he’s been retrieving a single serving cup of applesauce from the van’s cooler. It’s a bland enough food to keep from upsetting Winter’s stomach, they decided before the mission, but still a thousand times better than the engineered slop he lives off of. “I’ve got something for you. You’ve been so good for us, you’ve earned it.” He settles on the bed next to Brock, taking out a spoon. “Open your mouth, Winter.”

He does, pressing his lips together to drag every bit of the applesauce from the spoon once Jack slips it in. His eyes shine like fireworks. Watching his pleasure, Brock’s torn between laughter and tears.

“What’s this one, Sir?” Winter asks after Jack retracts the spoon, stroking a cluster of scarring from shrapnel on Brock’s hip.

“I rescued a cat from a tree and it clawed me up.”

“Does it still hurt?”

“No.” Brock draws him close. “Nothing hurts since we’ve found you.”

It’s a pretty lie and he hopes it comforts Winter when he goes back to the cryo-tank. The knowledge that Winter’s waiting for them is the only thing that keeps them going under all that cold. Insight’s not far off now. The helicarriers are set to launch in spring.

Their next mission with Cap is in February, and he shows up with belated Christmas gifts for the team. Brock gets a thick sweater in navy blue and Jack gets one in burgundy. They’re hand knit.

“You’re always turning up the heat in the vans,” Cap says, and Brock grins so wide it hurts, throwing a hand over Cap’s shoulder.

“You’re a hell of a guy, Rogers.”

A blush spreads over Cap’s face as he mutters something about having too much time on his hands. Jack examines his sweater and Brock knows that he’s thinking of saying he’s allergic to wool, but all he says is “Thanks.”

Rogers is quiet throughout the mission, distracted. It isn’t until they’re boarding the Quinjet back to DC that Brock figures out why. It’s February fourteenth. And Cap’s bondmate died back in 1944. For all the pain Brock’s felt through his closed bond, at least there’s an end in sight. Rogers doesn’t even have that as a comfort; all that will ease his suffering is his own death once Insight’s off the ground.

Brock gets an idea. Jack bitches and moans and threatens to withhold any and all handjobs for the next decade, but he caves in the end. They offer Cap a ride back to his apartment, refusing to take no for an answer.

But they don’t take him home. Instead, they stop at the Smithsonian.

Cap’s smile is small but genuine and as Brock grabs his wrist to haul him into the Captain America exhibit, he mutters “Thanks, guys.”

Rogers looks more alive than Brock’s ever seen him, wandering around the displays, telling them story after story of his men and their misadventures. He speaks of the Commandos with the same love Brock can hear in his own voice when he talks about the STRIKE team. He’s so open, so happy, and Brock’s heart aches a little.

It’s more than a little once they reach the memorial for James Buchanan Barnes.

This isn’t the first time in his life that Brock’s seen a picture of Barnes before. He’s been through school, he’s seen the specials about the Commandos that air every fourth of July. And he’s not a fucking idiot. He’s noticed the resemblance. But Barnes had always looked so alive, smiling and laughing and leaning against his dom in all their photographs.

The Winter Soldier’s never smiled before these past few missions.

Brock’s doubled over and hyperventilating. Jack isn’t much better off, but he manages to pull it together enough to make some excuse about food poisoning and refuse Steve’s offers of a drive to the hospital. They run.

Brock’s sick in the lobby of their apartment building. They’re silent, shaking, for hours.

“So what do we do?” Jack asks, well after midnight.

Brock has no answer.

“We could take him to Rogers,” Jack says.

“We can’t.”

“Brock—”

“He belongs to Rogers.” Brock’s eyes are burning with tears. He’s cold everywhere else. He’s always so cold and after this shock, he doubts he’ll ever be warm again. “By all rights, he should go back. That’s—Pierce fucking knew. After they pulled Rogers out of the ice, that next mission—he was checking for the _bond_. Something in their conditioning must have broken it but if we take Winter back to him—we’ll lose him, Jack. It’ll go back to the way things were before. When we didn’t fit.” He’s sobbing, face buried in his hands.

It’s not fair. None of it’s fucking fair. But it’s what they deserve for all that they’ve done to Winter. To everyone.

“I can’t go back to that, Jack. I can’t lose the two of you.”

And Jack nods. There are tears down his face too. “Then what do we do?”

“The same as before. Wait for Insight.”

He hates himself for saying it, but he’ll gladly hate himself for all eternity if it means keeping Winter for one more day.


	8. He Was Bound to Love You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year!

Brock’s throat feels as crushed as Jack’s, the pain of the Rogers’s blow flaring white hot across their bond. Back in the vault, Winter must be feeling it too. Must be panicking. He forces himself to speak. 

“Whoa, big guy.” Brock steadies himself as best he can, still panting for breath. He’s the last one in the elevator who’s both conscious and capable of movement. He has to make that count. Christ, how naïve was he to think that it could ever go down any easier than this? “I just want you to know, Cap, this isn’t personal!” 

And that’s a filthy fucking lie. It’s more personal than Rogers can ever be allowed to know. 

Brock lashes out with all he’s got, and it’s not enough. Rogers slams him against the ceiling like a rag doll. Brock doesn’t feel the impact; all he can perceive is Jack’s pain, Winter’s confusion, and his own roiling self-disgust. 

Within ten minutes of waking, an extremely unamused Pierce puts Brock in charge of Jack and four other agents, shipping them out for the mall where their tracking signal places Rogers. They say in transit that Rogers jumped out of the damn elevator and walked off without a limp, that he took down a Quinjet with nothing but his shield. Brock just prays this is a nightmare, trying to send calm through their bond and back to Winter in the vault. He’s going to fucking kill Rogers for threatening his family, for putting this stress on his sub. 

They spread out through the mall, searching the floors with increasing desperation. There’s a couple making out on the escalator and the guy’s about the same height as Rogers, but Rogers wouldn’t dishonor a bond, even a broken one. 

When they return to the Triskelion, they’ve got nothing to show for their hour of scouting. Pierce calmly wraps his hand around Brock’s throat and squeezes, waiting until there are strained tears down the agent’s face before he says how very disappointed he is in Rumlow’s performance. “If you continue to fail me, Agent, your use to HYDRA will be at its end. And Insight would be much too quick of a dismissal.” 

Brock has to stamp down the rush of hatred, has to clutch the fabric of his pants to keep from lashing out in retaliation. _Why don’t you take on a fucking super soldier and see how it turns out_? He’s never reacted this way to a dressing down before. But then, he’s never received one with three people’s panic churning in his gut. 

There’s nothing they can do now but wait for some sign of Rogers. A few times Brock entertains the notion of inventing some excuse to slip to the bank vault, try and settle his submissive’s nerves. But no one’s allowed near the asset without a verifiable reason, and especially not someone on Pierce’s shit list. So Brock and Jack just fucking wait, like patients trying to kill time before they hear whether or not the mass in their X-rays is cancerous. They try and think calming thoughts at Winter. It almost works. 

They don’t get the news that Pierce has authorized a missile strike on Fort Lehigh until the bogey’s already in the air. Rumlow allows himself to sit back and just _breathe_ on the Quinjet. No one can survive that kind of assault, not even with the super soldier serum. Rogers is dead. Has to be. 

Or so he thinks until he’s staring down at a fresh footprint in the debris, feeling his heart plummet. 

There’s only one fucking person in the whole world who can take down Steve Rogers and it’s Brock’s bondmate. And maybe he and Jack could shoot their way through the vault and steal Winter, but to what end? They don’t have a way to stop Insight’s launch. They don’t know where Rogers has gone and even if they did, he’d blow their heads off before they got close enough to negotiate any sort of a ceasefire. He’d take Winter away from them. 

Brock bites his lip until blood spills through to keep from hyperventilating. He can feel Winter’s heartbeat, rapid and worried, and he isn’t going to make it any worse by losing his head. Damn it, every flash of panic they’ve felt from Winter today has been in response to danger toward them, not Rogers, and that has to be a fucking sign.

“Call in the asset,” Brock orders, ignoring Jack’s stare. Winter’s a sniper. He won’t even have to get close. 

But he does get close. And Brock knows the mission’s gone horribly wrong long before he’s near enough to see Winter’s mask lying on the ground. It hits him when he’s still en route to the battle: waves of horror and bewilderment, a thousand times worse than when they bonded. He falls to his knees as Jack is sinking down right beside him, and no matter what they try to think or feel, their sub’s mind remains in chaos. Winter’s drowning and tugging on the lifeline brings him no closer to the surface. 

“Not here,” Brock hisses when Jack has his gun pointed at Rogers’s head. It would be so easy. It would keep them safe. But they _can’t_ , and Brock doesn’t even know if that’s because of the news chopper or because Winter’s bond is fucking up his judgment. It doesn’t matter. They have Rogers. It’s almost over. 

And then Brock’s staring at the empty van that housed Rogers and his compatriots, the edges of their escape hole still red hot. He can’t even cry. All they can feel now is what’s coming from Winter, and that’s too overwhelming for their own emotions. 

Jack’s sent to the vault while Brock reports to Pierce. There are more threats and blows this time, and Brock thinks at least one of his ribs crack, but Winter’s not alone anymore. He tries to hold onto that. 

Until there’s a new flame of panic from Winter, panic and rage. Brock follows Pierce to the vault and Winter doesn’t even _see_ him, lost in his own suffering. They’re bonded, but there’s not a damn thing they can do to help. 

_Maybe the bond’s breaking_ , Brock can’t help but think. _Maybe seeing Rogers is bringing back what they had, and he’ll leave us_. He can’t breathe.

Pierce is stroking his hand through Winter’s hair, trying to draw his attention. “Soldier,” he says. “My sweet little soldier, I need you to look at me.” 

Winter doesn’t move. Doesn’t lean toward the touch. He’s gone. 

“Look at me, sweet boy.” Pierce’s voice is soft. His other hand rests on Winter’s shoulder, gently rubbing. None of the tension fades from Winter’s body. “Be good for me. I need a mission report, all right? I know you can give me one.” 

There’s no answer. Winter’s not fucking there. Even bonded, Brock’s not sure where he’s gone. 

_Maybe with Rogers._

Pierce sighs, steps back, and backhands their submissive full-force across the face. Jack lets out a muffled cry he disguises as a cough, grabbing Brock’s arm to keep him from retaliating. 

Winter finally comes back to life. He doesn’t look for his dominants. He only raises his gaze to meet Pierce’s. “The man on the bridge,” he says. “Who was he?” 

And Steve Rogers is going to die even if they have to burn the world to find him. Brock will make sure of that.

“You met him last week on another assignment, dear.” Pierce has resumed the stroking now that Winter’s responding, but the submissive shies away from his touch. 

“I knew him.” 

He hasn’t looked at Brock or Jack. They can still feel his confusion. He’s given no indication as to whether he can feel their heartbreak. 

Pierce sits. Winter shrinks back but doesn’t pull away when the Secretary takes his hand. Even through all the chaos in his head, he knows better than that. “Listen. Your work has been a gift to mankind, my sweet boy. You’ve shaped the century for us. You’ve been so good. And I need you to do it just this one more time, all right? Society’s at a tipping point between order and chaos now, and tomorrow morning, we’re going to give it a very important push. But if you don’t do your part, I can’t do mine. And HYDRA can’t give the world the freedom it deserves. You want to help us, don’t you? You want to be a good boy?” 

“But I knew him,” Winter says, eyes wet. 

And that ought to be the final nail in the coffin, but Brock’s heart doesn’t have the decency to stop. 

Pierce stands up, not bothering to hide his annoyance. “Prep him.” 

“He’s been out of cryo-freeze too long,” one of the technicians protests. 

“Then wipe him and start over.” 

And Winter actually _glares_ when they slip the bite guard in, clamping his teeth down on it like a snarling dog. Like he’s finally realized the indignity of their treatment and the full extent of what HYDRA’s taken away. Brock almost expects him to struggle. 

But then the chair clamps down around his arms and Winter’s mind falls to panic. He remembers the hurt of this. Moreover, he remembers what it removes. They feel him reaching out then, _finally _. Reaching out to them. Begging in silence.__

And there’s not a damn thing they can do. 

Brock tries to turn his head and follow after Pierce, but he forces himself to look back. Winter deserves that much. He deserves the whole world, but this is the best that Brock can give him. 

Jack stays behind, ordering the techs back and running his hands over Winter’s trembling frame once he’s out of the chair. His panic is gone. There’s only the bond and the focus of the Soldier. 

Until the Soldier’s staring down a familiar target in the helicarrier. 

He doesn’t want to hurt this man. But he has to. He is HYDRA’s, and his Sirs will not be happy if he fails his mission. They aren’t happy now. One of them was hurt and is sleeping. The other—the Soldier feels they should have names, but there’s only electricity and dark in his head—is running, panting, worried. 

The Soldier must be good for them. He has to finish the mission and go back to them. They need his help, and then they can make things right. 

So he fights. It hurts his stomach and disturbs his breathing, but he makes himself go on. He thinks one of his Sirs is in combat as well. He can feel it. His heart goes faster in his chest, but his Sir knows how to fight. 

The Soldier usually knows how to fight. Today his heart is too fast and his thoughts are all over. And the familiar target is very strong and skilled. It doesn’t matter. The Soldier cannot lose. If he fails his mission, HYDRA will not want him anymore and his Sirs will probably not want him either. The target wrenches the Soldier’s arm from the socket and the Soldier screams. The pain is immense. The target is squeezing his throat and he falls into blackness. 

But there are too many thoughts in the Soldier’s head to let him sleep for long. He shouldn’t have so many thoughts. The chair is meant to fix that, and wasn’t he just in the chair? Maybe he is broken, or maybe these thoughts are from his Sirs. He thinks the sleeping one is rousing. 

It takes three shots to make the target stop. It is not the Soldier’s best performance, not even close. But it’s over. He ought to feel better, except the helicarrier is falling apart around him and everything hurts and his Sirs are not happy. The sleeping one is up now, frightened, running very fast. The other—

There’s a metal support beam crashing down onto the Soldier, but it isn’t metal he feels making the impact. Not _just_ metal. It’s also stone and glass and wood. There’s no fire around him but he can feel smoke and debris striking his face, clogging his lungs. The Soldier knows he is struggling because each movement sends pain shooting through his shoulder, but it seems as though he can't move at all. 

Something very bad has happened to his other Sir. 

He cries out. The target is back up and the Soldier cannot defend himself. It doesn’t matter. He was to make sure the helicarriers were operational and this helicarrier is collapsing around them. HYDRA will not love him anymore. He thinks he may be dying. He is sure one of his Sirs is dying. 

And he doesn’t even know their names. 

The target is pulling the beam up and the Soldier scrambles free. He is unsteady and his lungs won’t take in enough air. The scent of smoke is overpowering. 

“You know me,” says the target. 

“No, I don’t!” The Soldier lashes out. The target is meant to be dead. It doesn’t matter that the man’s face makes pictures surface through the darkness in the Soldier’s mind. It doesn’t matter what he feels. His Sir is _dying_ and his Sirs are HYDRA and HYDRA will not love him if he fails them. All he wants is to be loved, to be good. He can’t understand why that’s suddenly so hard. 

“Bucky,” the target pleads. “You’ve known me your whole life.” 

The Soldier’s scream this time is wordless. Everything hurts and he thinks he could handle that if only there were an end in sight. 

“Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.” 

And that feels right, but it can’t be. His name is _Winter_ ; he’s heard it through his bond. He is Winter. But he’s James. But HYDRA said he didn’t need a name, he just needed to be their good soldier. But he’s Bucky. But he’s Winter—”

“ _Shut up_!” he shouts, striking a third time. He knocks the both of them to the floor yet again, sending new waves of pain through his body. He can’t keep falling. Sir is injured and the shock through the bond could kill him. But the target is getting back up. He’s always getting back up. 

_Aren’t_ I _supposed to be the one who likes getting punched?_ the Soldier thinks, without understanding why.

The target’s helmet is off. His hair is too short. Too short for what? “I’m not gonna fight you,” he pants, dropping his shield into the water. He is open to attack now. 

The Soldier does not move. 

“You’re my...” The target hesitates. He’s not speaking but the Soldier can see so many words in his eyes. He doesn’t understand any of them. “You’re my friend.” 

The Soldier tackles him. He doesn’t need friends. He doesn’t _want_ friends. He wants to be good and he wants Sir to be all right and the more he listens to the target, the more he malfunctions. The worse he becomes. “You’re my mission,” he growls, striking the target with the arm HYDRA gave him. They’ve given him so many nice things. 

This man gives him only thoughts, and all the thoughts hurt. 

“You’re my mission!” He strikes again and again. Maybe if he beats the face before him into pulp, it will cease to pain him. 

“Then finish it,” the target gasps. He isn’t trying to free himself. “’Cause I’m with you ‘till the end of the line.” 

And the Soldier remembers. 

He remembers resting his head in Sir’s lap, telling him those words. He remembers sobbing against Sir’s chest, on his knees, a hand on his neck making the world go still. A kiss and a boy straightening his scarf. A hand trailing his chest as he lay on the bed, a voice telling him he was perfect. He remembers Sir. 

But this man...the Soldier can’t feel him. He has two Sirs, one in a panic and one trapped in wreckage, and neither is the body beneath him. How can the target be his Sir when there’s no bond? 

The glass below gives way before the Soldier can make sense of it. 

The Sir he isn’t bonded to is falling, striking the water. 

And without thinking, the Soldier follows after. 

It is hard to swim with a metal arm, and harder still with a dislocated shoulder. With his bondmates’ panic and pain accompanying his own and his lungs feeling full of both water and smoke, it is nearly impossible. 

But the Sir he is not bonded to once said that he would never leave him, and the Soldier can’t leave him now. He’s gasping for air when they reach the surface, spitting out mouthfuls of water, his heart too fast to make out the beats, but his target—his Sir, his friend—is safe. 

The Soldier makes sure the man is breathing before he turns away. He has to find his Sirs, has to save them. They’ll set things right, he knows they will. He only needs to find them. 

He makes it two steps before he collapses, exhausted and hurt and unconscious. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Technically, this chapter's title is from the [All I Ask of You reprise](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t75STnoaR1w) rather than All I Ask of You proper. Even though it takes place immediately following the initial song.


	9. Let Me Be Your Freedom

The thing about hospitals is that they aren’t hard to infiltrate, especially after a disaster.

The destruction of the helicarriers happened over the Potomac, but that doesn’t mean the fallout was confined there. Debris rained from the skies before the ships went down, some of it flaming. The Triskelion wasn’t the only building hit in the fallout. Two days later and the surrounding hospitals are still flooded with patients. Burns, crush injuries, heart attacks, smoke inhalation. Even trampling wounds for those who couldn’t run away fast enough. And that’s the just the patients. There are grieving families, people in hysterics searching for their loved ones. Reporters clogging up the lobbies. It’s a clusterfuck.

And in a disaster, one of the last places in a hospital that anyone focuses on is the laundry room.

Jack may be built like goddamn bear, but nobody makes STRIKE if they’re not capable of stealth. It isn’t hard: Walk with a purpose. Anyone asks, claim to have gotten turned around looking for a phlebotomist. Find a pair of scrubs long enough that they don’t look like high waters. Throw on a surgical cap. Ignore the smell of burnt flesh permeating through the bond. Don’t let the pain or the fear show on your face.

This is Winter’s hospital. Once Jack made it out of the Triskelion, it took a full day to calm himself enough to track his bondmates down. He’d already made it outside before he realized Brock was still in there, having woken up from the Widow’s hit in a blind panic that he thinks was mostly Winter’s. Jack had been turning back to save his partner when the helicarrier hit. When Brock was trapped.

Everyone says bonds are so fucking beautiful, how wonderful it is to feel a partner’s presence at all times, no matter the distance. No one ever said it would hurt. No one ever told Jack he’d end up sick and scared and unable to offer the slightest bit of comfort to his bondmates.

 _Get over it_. Brock’s half-dead. Winter’s surely under guard and definitely unconscious. Probably sedated. Jack’s the only one left capable of salvaging their lives and it’s about damn time for him to take charge of things.

Winter has to be the first rescue. His guard will be much heavier, but security will only improve as time goes by. They’ll want to move him to a more secure location as quickly as possible. Beyond that, he’s less injured than Brock and liable to do something dangerous and stupid if he wakes up alone.

Not that Brock isn’t a master of dangerous stupidity. But all Jack can sense from Brock is agony and charred flesh, so for once his partner’s ass is reliably grounded. Brock’s rescue has to come later; if they don’t give him time to heal, he’ll die on them. And Winter is the least accustomed to feeling their bond and so the hardest to soothe through it. He’s the submissive, the most emotional, the one in greatest need of support. They’ve failed him for so long already. Jack can’t let him suffer any longer.

He tells himself that, struggling to keep his hands steady as he swipes an ID badge from a nurse’s station. It’s true, of course it’s true, but Brock’s been his closest friend for decades, all the way back to when he enlisted. And leaving him stranded in a burn ward for even a minute feels like the ultimate betrayal.

Jack devotes a few hours to observation. Swiping carts and IV stands to justify his presence, he slips up and down the halls, taking in the number and location of guards. He watches the nurses making rounds through Rogers’s and Winter’s hospital rooms, counting the minutes between each visit. He’ll knock one of them out, zip-tie their wrists and gag them before stashing them in a closet. He’ll take that nurse’s place, barricade the door, and shut off Winter’s IV drip. Once the sedatives are metabolized, which shouldn’t take long thanks to the serum, they can slip through a window or fight their way free. Jack came armed.

The plan’s full of fucking holes and Brock would call him a dumbass if he were around to hear it. But it’s the best Jack’s got when he’s completely alone with limited resources, even more limited time, and his face and file dumped online thanks to the Widow.

He doesn’t even get as far as knocking out a nurse before there’s a familiar voice behind him.

“You try and kill your team lead and then you don’t even show up with flowers?”

Jack turns. Of course it’s Natasha fucking Romanoff. Her Glock’s aimed at his face and around them, the guards are circling in, their own handguns drawn.

He doesn’t have the bulletproof vest on him. He’d wanted to bring it along for Winter, but it had been too damn obvious under the scrubs. Not that it matters. The Widow can pull off a headshot. At this distance, they all can.

Jack stomps down the wave of panic as he puts his hands up. He’s tensed all over and there’s a jolt of pain through his right arm when he moves. Psychosomatic probably, like all the stomachaches in the past couple of years. He won’t be taken in sobbing like a coward. And he can’t lose his head when Winter and Brock need him to be the strong one.

“I have to see him before you lock me up.”

“The last thing Rogers needs is a HYDRA vigil at his bedside.”

“Why the fuck would I want to see Rogers?” Jack spits.

The Widow narrows her eyes. “Barnes isn’t your plaything anymore, Rollins. He’s broken through your conditioning—he’s not about to come rushing to your aid.”

There’s another voice behind him, also familiar and so very quiet. “Sir?”

And Jack turns to face his submissive, not giving a shit toward the guns trained on him.

They’re mostly trained on Winter now anyway. He’s in a hospital gown, slumping against the doorframe. There’s blood down his right arm; he must have yanked out his IV. Winter’s hair is tangled around his face and his eyes are dark, drugged, haunted.

In that moment, Jack’s never seen anything so beautiful.

“Sir,” Winter says again. And then he rushes toward Jack.

There’s a commotion—the guards barking orders at Winter to be still and the Widow yelling at them to hold their fire—but Jack doesn’t hear it. Winter slams into him with a force that would knock him over if his submissive’s arms weren’t circling around him, clinging tight. His face is buried against Jack’s shoulder, quiet little whimpers muffled into Jack’s shirt. It’s not his own pain that has him near tears, it’s Brock’s.

“It’s all right, Winter,” Jack murmurs against his submissive’s hair. He pulls Winter even closer, running a hand up and down his back. “It’s all right, you’re safe.”

“It hurts,” Winter says. He never complains of his own pain, always carries on until his injuries are too severe to keep moving. But knowing his bondmate is hurt, it seems, is too much to bear.

“I know.” Jack doesn’t say _it’ll be all right_ because he can’t promise that. For all he knows, Brock won’t make it through the day. And he can’t lie to Winter, even to comfort him. The man’s been fed nothing but lies for decades. Jack can’t, won’t add to that. “I know, I feel it too.”

“I miss him.”

And Jack just hugs tighter because he can’t fucking speak.

“Barnes,” says the Widow.

Winter tenses up at that, a little gasp starting and dying in his throat. Whatever ghosts Romanoff’s dragged up with that one word, Jack could kill her. Winter shakes his head. His hair and skin smell of disinfectant. It mixes with the thick, putrid, sickly sweet odor of burnt flesh that’s settled in their lungs. No amount of bathing will ever wash it away.

“You need to step away from Rollins,” she continues.

“Rollins,” Winter repeats, like it’s a word he’s never heard before.

And Jack’s eyes sting with tears when he thinks of the last wipe and realizes that it is.

“Barnes. Soldier. You’re bleeding.”

“What’s his name, Sir?” Winter murmurs, his breath warm against Jack’s throat.

“It’s Brock,” Jack whispers. “His name is Brock and my name is Jack. And no matter what happens, no one will ever take those names from you again, okay? You never have to go back to that chair.”

“Jack.” It’s the first time Winter’s ever said his name. And whatever dark hole they’re going to throw him in, Jack will always have this moment. Will always have this bond. He can see the beauty of it now. It’s just no one ever said how much beauty can fucking sting.

“Get your hands off him.” And there’s Rogers.

Jack doesn’t turn to look at him. He’s seen Captain America quaking in righteous indignation enough times to have it memorized. Like hell is he going to waste his last minutes with Winter on that.

But Winter looks, raising his head. He’s still, his eyes narrowed and analyzing. He’d look just as he does on the field if not for the gown and the way his hand shakes. “I know him,” Winter says, almost to himself, but then he turns to Jack, expectant and trusting and fuck, why did Jack promise himself he’d never lie?

“You do,” is all he can force himself to say.

“Bucky, it’s Steve,” Rogers says at the exact same time.

Winter makes another wounded noise, shifting just enough in Jack’s grip to clutch the metal hand to his forehead. He’s still bleeding. Jack’s overcome with the urge to apply pressure to the needle site, to soothe the one hurt he can actually touch, but he’s on the business end of so many guns and he can’t risk setting off a trigger happy agent while Winter’s in his arms.

“I don’t understand.” Winter’s twisting his hand through his hair then, pulling. And Jack reaches out to stop him, guns be damned. Pain settles Winter, but there’s more than enough pain flowing through their bond, both emotional and physical. “He’s—I—he’s Sir but I can’t feel him like you. What did I do I wrong?”

“Nothing,” Jack soothes. His hand is still at Winter’s hairline and he resumes stroking down the tangled locks. “Look, a long time ago, you were—” He swallows, sickened. “A long time ago, Rogers was your dominant. I don’t know what HYDRA did when they found you, but your bond with him—they took it away. Maybe—maybe there’s a way to get it back. I don’t know. Winter, all I know is that Brock and I are bonded to you _now_ , and we will be here for you as long as we can. I promise.”

For a long moment, there’s quiet. Jack’s words, raw and painfully intimate in this setting, hang in the air. He can feel Brock’s heartbeat from miles away, but it doesn’t bring peace. It just hammers in that awful burning scent.

“He’s not bonded to you, Bucky,” Rogers says. “They’re trying to control you.”

And Jack finally turns to look at him, because Winter is his and he’s Winter’s and Rogers can say whatever else he wants about Jack, but he can’t fucking take that from him. “Sorry, _Cap._ You weren’t around when he needed you, and we were the right ones to step in.”

For once in his life, Rogers looks wrecked. His face is bruised and stitched up in three separate places, his lip split. He’s even paler than usual, and both Wilson and the doorframe of his hospital room are providing the necessary support to keep him upright. Winter must have damn near killed him, and Jack grins in spite of himself. _Good boy, Winter. Good job._

Predictably, Rogers ignores him. “Bucky, he’s a HYDRA agent. He’s lying to you.”

Winter’s shaking his head again, looking as lost as he did when he was asking Pierce about Rogers. “I’m HYDRA,” he mutters. “HYDRA loves me. They—I can feel you.” He turns to Jack, features twisted as though he wants to be hopeful, but hope was beaten out of him before Jack was even born. “I can feel you.” He says it like a prayer.

“You can,” Jack says. “As long as I’m living, you always will, no matter what they tell you. Brock too.”

“Buck—”

“Enough,” Jack snaps. He’s got a best a handful of minutes more before they drag him away from Winter for the rest of his life, and like hell is he going to let Rogers piss that time away denying the truth. Winter’s his, even though Jack doesn’t deserve him, and he’s not letting his submissive be bullied into thinking otherwise. “We’re bonded, the three of us. Do a fucking blood test if you’re so sure we’re lying.” It’ll be there, irrefutable, in their hormones.

Until Rogers gets Stark to find a way to break it.

Jack shakes his head, fighting off a panic attack. “Winter, you need to listen to me. You deserve better than us, I know that. We weren’t there for you when it really counted. And I will regret that for the rest of my life. But we love you. We love you more than anything, and if we had the chance, we’d spend every day of our lives making up for what we put you through. I want you to remember that for me, all right? No matter what happens, even if you can’t see us or feel us anymore, even if you decide that you like Rogers better, remember that we love you.”

“But you’re my Sir,” Winter says. “You’re my Sir.” He’s repeating it, Jack realizes, to try and commit it to a deeper level of memory. To bury it deep before it’s taken away. “You’ll always be around me.”

Rogers is starting to speak, but he doesn’t get the last word here. He can decide what cell they throw Jack in, pick what tortures they’ll use to try and force HYDRA’s secrets out of out him. But he doesn’t get to control the goodbye. “I have to go, Winter.” Jack bends down just enough to brush his lips against his submissive’s forehead. “I don’t know if we’ll get to see each other again. But you’ll be able to feel me, all right? Both of us. As long as we’re living. Rogers—Steve will take care of you. He’ll keep you safe. And you’ll be free. That’s what’s important.”

Winter’s hand clamps onto Jack’s arm, the gears inside whirring as his grip tightens. “I want to see you.”

“That’s not—”

“I don’t just want to _feel_ you!” His voice, unaccustomed to raising, unaccustomed to any use at all, breaks. “I could feel your heartbeat in the ice, but it was still so _cold_. I’m awake now, I want to see you!”

“Winter—”

“Bucky.” It’s not Rogers who speaks this time; it’s Wilson. “You’re bleeding, man. You’re injured, and you’re under a lot of stress. How about you take a seat and let us patch you up, okay? We can talk when—”

“I’m not letting you touch me!” Winter’s hand clenches. Jack assumes it’s involuntary. He still has to bite down his tongue to keep from crying out at the force of it. “You can’t take my Sir!”

“He’s not your dominant, Bucky!” And Rogers has closed the space between them, grabbing hold of Winter’s opposite arm. “He’s not.”

Winter wrenches his eyes shut, a low keen escaping his lips. He trembles like he can’t decide which man to lean toward and which to pull away from. His grip slackens and Jack takes advantage, tugging loose and stepping back.

And Winter’s eyes fly open at that, wide and betrayed.

“Winter, you have to let them help you. We don’t want you to get hurt.” He can’t stand the thought of leaving him here, alone and vulnerable. Rogers is going to try and manipulate him back into being Bucky Barnes, regardless of all that he’s been through. He’ll use Winter as a puppet to relive his past. It makes Jack sick.

But better to leave Winter with the Avengers and keep their bond open than to struggle and get his brains blown out in front of his sub. Better to resign himself to imprisonment than to make Winter feel the pain of a dead bondmate.

Winter’s hyperventilating, shaking in Rogers’s arms. Jack can feel him struggling through his memories, trying to grasp something lurking just out of reach.

The agents step in around Jack, order his hands up. “He’s not used to solid foods,” Jack says as he complies, half to Rogers and half to empty air. “He likes applesauce.”

“Coney,” Winter whispers, eyes shining with unshed tears.

And that hurts even more than Brock’s burns. “Oh sugar, it doesn’t work that way.”

“Coney.” He’s a little louder this time, insistent. “ _Coney_.”

They’re forcing Jack’s hands behind his back, zip-tying them together at the wrist. “I love you, Winter. Never forget that.”

They begin to lead him away as Winter starts struggling. It takes Rogers, Romanoff, and Wilson combined to keep him at all contained. “ _Coney_!” he shrieks. There’s a doctor rushing at him with a sedative. “Coney! You _promised_! You promised if I said it, you would help! _Coney_!”

And then Jack’s being forced into the elevator, Winter’s screams echoing behind him. Jack’s failed him. He’s failed both his bondmates. And the pain he’s feeling from the pair of them isn’t nearly punishment enough.


	10. My Words Will Warm and Calm You

“I missed you, Sir,” Bucky says. His words are muffled through the sound system, intelligible to Steve outside but still tinny.

Rollins doesn’t speak. For a long moment he stares at Bucky standing just inside the doorway. Then he gives a shuddering sigh and throws out his arms, eyes wet.

And Bucky rushes forward, sinking into Rollins’s embrace as if he’s Humphrey Bogart and Bucky’s Ingrid Bergman. _We’ll always have HYDRA._

When Rollins finally answers, it’s even more muddled thanks to his tears. “I didn’t think they’d let me see you ever again.”

Rollins has spent a week in containment at the Stark Tower. _Avengers_ Tower now, as Tony keeps insisting. The double agent had spent a good two hours stuck in a SWAT van outside the hospital before they’d decided where to ship him. Bucky had spent the first fifteen minutes of those hours shrieking before the sedatives kicked in.

Nothing Steve said or did comforted him. And that—finally being reunited with the love of his life and completely unable to offer solace—made Steve feel even more useless than he had watching Bucky fall from the train.

Rollins couldn’t be taken into SHIELD’s custody. Not every rat went down with the ship and they weren’t about to trust the remains of the organization to keep a HYDRA agent secured and unabetted. The general population of a prison was likewise out of the question. Americans as a whole responded to “HYDRA” about as well as they did to “Nazis.” Rollins might as well have walked in with a target painted on him. Solitary confinement was a possibility, but if HYDRA had so easily infiltrated the government, what was to keep them from slipping someone into a prison to free or dispose of their captive agent?

And so Rollins is here, in a space that was once an experimentation room and is now a makeshift, high end cell.

“I stopped eating until they let me see you,” Bucky explains, settling into Jack’s lap. Steve can still remember the first time Bucky sat on _his_ lap outside of childhood, once the serum had fixed things so that Steve could properly hold him. He shuts his eyes.

And Bucky had stopped eating, even when Steve brought him applesauce. The worst part wasn’t seeing Bucky deteriorate—super soldiers drop weight easily and dramatically—not by a long shot. The very worst thing was the _noises_ Bucky would make when he refused, as though some part of his mind remembered that he used to follow Steve’s orders and to reject them now was causing him pain.

Maybe he _does_ remember parts of the past. Steve wouldn’t know; Bucky won’t speak to him.

“Winter, you have to eat,” Rollins says, and Steve opens his eyes. He tries to see only his reflection in the two-way mirror, tries not to look at the man he loves clinging to the man who would have happily killed him.

The blood tests were positive.

Bucky had demanded the test as soon as they had him settled back into his hospital bed. The nurse had pricked Bucky’s finger before chasing after Rollins’s escort with a lancet, ignoring Steve’s protests.

“They’re not bonded!” he’d insisted. “He was their prisoner! He couldn’t have—”

“Then the tests will show that,” Natasha had said flatly as she and Sam dragged Steve to his own bed.

But they hadn’t. The next morning, Natasha walked in with a few sheets of paper as Steve was trying to coax Bucky into trying his breakfast.

“The bonding hormone’s present in Barnes and Rollins.” She sat the results on the tray beside Bucky’s carton of milk, face unreadable. “They don’t have a sample from Rumlow. He’d have to consent to the test and he’s in a medically induced coma.”

“Who gave you his medical records?” Sam had asked. “That’s all kinds of unethical.”

“I stole them.” Natasha crossed her arms. “They were taking too long to deliver.”

“I told ya,” Bucky said, smiling, sounding for a second just as he used to back in Brooklyn. As if no time has passed at all. But then he’d hesitated, drawing in on himself, rounding his shoulders as if to make himself smaller. And Steve had never seen Bucky respond that way. Not when Steve shouted at him for being reckless on the field, not when Peggy threatened to tan his hide for sass, and not even when the drunk in their apartment building used to scream slurs and threats when Bucky was walking home at night. He’d never cowered for fear of punishment and certainly not for so harmless a remark.

Anyone capable of doing that to Bucky, anyone who would let Bucky stay in those circumstances...they couldn’t be his bondmate. They _couldn’t._

“Then they found a way to force it,” Steve said.

And Sam was shaking his head. “Steve—”

“Technically that’s possible.” Natasha’s face was impassive. Whether she thought it was likely was anyone’s guess. “The bonding hormone can be synthetically replicated for therapies. Failure to thrive cases and that sort of thing. It’s been proposed as an aid for unbonded couples, to bring them closer together if they both receive the therapy. His blood work’s a mess—they had him on no shortage of substances to counteract the stress of the missions and wipes. Hormone therapy could have been a part of it. And in that case, we’d just have to wait a few days to see if the levels recede.”

“But?” Steve had prompted, because while there was no endorsement or dismissal in her expression, there was a hesitation as she spoke.

“He’d have to stay away from anyone with a bond in that time. Otherwise their presence could increase his hormone production.”

They called it pheromone therapy these days. In Steve’s time it had just been a folk remedy. Being around somebody bonded made everyone feel better, regardless of whether or not they had a bond themselves. That was why so many employees in nursing homes were bonded: it helped to ease the pain of the elderly whose bondmates had already died.

“I have to see my Sirs,” Bucky said. “They’re hurt. They need me.”

“You need to eat, Buck.” Steve offered the applesauce. Like it was going to help anything. “We can talk once you’re done, okay?”

He shook his head, huddling even smaller. “They need me.”

“I don’t want anyone to take advantage of you,” Steve had said. “Not ever again. Please, Bucky, eat.”

“I won’t.”

And he hadn’t. Not until the next round of tests showed no decrease in the hormone’s presence. Not until Steve told him he could come here and see Rollins.

“You have to eat,” Rollins repeats. “When we’re not around to take care of you, you have to do it for yourself, all right? Don’t fight them, Winter. They want to help you.”

“But they wouldn’t let me see you,” Bucky protests. His head is buried in Rollins’s shoulder, and _God_ does Steve remember that. The heat of Bucky’s body, the faint scratch of stubble against Steve’s throat... 

Steve rests his head against the mirror. If he closes his eyes tears will slide out, so he doesn’t. He doesn’t blink.

“We’ll still be able to feel you. And we can feel when you’re hungry.” For a moment Steve watches Rollins pet Bucky’s hair before his vision starts swimming. “Brock’s hurt already, we shouldn’t give him stomachaches too.”

“He’s sleeping.”

“You could feel us when you were sleeping,” Rollins says, and Steve stops breathing as well. In the past week, Natasha’s recovered Bucky’s file. Steve’s read it through more times than he cares to count, even though it was all burned into his mind after the first look. Bucky hasn’t slept in seventy years, not naturally. He’s been buried in ice. Steve went through that once and he still wakes up in the night with his heart racing. Bucky was subjected to it again and again, and his _bondmate_ calls it sleeping.

“I couldn’t feel when you were hungry,” Bucky protests.

“We never were,” Rollins counters, although Steve knows for a fact the man has some sort of stomach condition that used to make him unable to hold down food for a few days at a time.

“Man, you have gotta stop doing this to yourself.”

Steve raises his head and Sam’s standing beside him in front of the mirror, a fast food bag in his hand. “Take a break from all this. I got you a burger.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Oh no,” Sam says. “Oh hell no. You’ve been gifted with a metabolism that lets you have all the carbs you could ever want with no repercussions, and I am so gonna live vicariously through that. Besides, you stop eating, what kinda example are you setting for your boy?”

And Steve has to look away, has to clench his hands until his knuckles go white to keep from coming apart. “He’s not my boy. He never was.”

“I always used to wonder. All the books said you were bonded, but there were never any official documents.”

It’s harder to stand now than it was at the hospital, back with an open gunshot wound in his gut. Steve sinks to the floor, running a hand through his hair and tugging. It doesn’t aid in his composure. He’s not like Bucky; a flicker of pain never gave him relief.

“I wanted to be bonded with him,” he admits as Sam settles down beside him. “More than anything, I wanted it. We _fit_ , Sam. When we were together, it was like there was nobody else in the world. I thought the serum would fix it, but it didn’t. Then I thought Peggy—but—we made it work.” He shakes his head. “No, we didn’t have to _make_ anything. It did work. It did. The three of us were all so happy. We didn’t need a bond to make it real. It was always real.”

He stops, intensely aware of how ragged his breathing’s become. But Sam doesn’t speak. He waits, his face almost as guarded as Natasha’s can be. And before Steve can stop himself, more words come spilling out.

“And now he has bonded. To the people who kept him locked up! They took away his memories, Sam. They tried to kill me! I don’t care how deep into HYDRA they were, I don’t. How can you let those things happen to someone you love more than life itself? Why couldn’t—” He cuts himself off, burying his face in his hands. Steve can’t go to pieces. The world’s too much of a mess right now for him to fall apart as well.

Sam pulls a burger wrapped in paper from the bag and deposits it on Steve’s lap. “You don’t want the pickles, I’ll take ‘em. Why couldn’t it have been you, right?”

“Yeah, I’m jealous. I’ve never been more jealous of anything in my life.” Steve pulls back the paper, suddenly ravenous, and tears the burger in half with one bite. “But that doesn’t mean I’m _wrong_. They chose HYDRA. They chose evil. Bucky deserves better than that. He deserves better than me too—the only person who’s ever been worthy of him’s Peggy, and even that didn’t take—but I would never have let those things happen to my bondmate. _Never_. And now God or the universe or whatever’s trying to tell me that he’s theirs? How am I supposed to accept that? How can I leave him in the hands of the people who used him as a weapon?”

His tears splatter onto his hand and then onto the bun. Steve shakes his head, scrubbing at his eyes with his sleeve.

“Remind me to get you two of those next time,” Sam says. “You can share my fries if you’re still hungry. Don’t cry into ‘em, though, they’re salty enough.”

Steve’s mouth twitches in spite of himself. He shakes his head again.

“Ever heard the saying, ‘it’s not what you want, it’s what you need’?” Sam asks.

“He needed to be tortured and brainwashed?” Steve clenches his opposite hand, shredding the napkin. “Don’t.”

“I don’t know what happened once he bonded. Neither do you, for that matter. People bond with murderers sometimes, Steve. Rapists. Even a couple of serial killers were said to have bondmates. It doesn’t make any damn sense, I know. But they must have given Barnes something that he needed when he was all alone. Some little bit of human touch, something necessary to keep him going. People are complicated, man. They don’t fit into neat little boxes of good and evil.”

“But you can still divide them into the kind you save and the kind you stop?”

“There’s a lot less room for nuance in a war.” Sam digs through the bag and pulls out a fistful of ketchup packets. “But we won. We can catch our breath.”

“I’m not going to accept that they’re the ones meant for him, Sam.” He can’t bring himself to take another bite, suddenly nauseated. “I can’t.”

“You’re the only one who can decide how you oughta react to this.” Sam stands, taking the bag with him. “But keep in mind, whatever you choose is going to have an impact on how Barnes reacts to you.”

“I would have given him the world, Sam.”

“Did you ever think it’s not about you being unworthy?” Sam asks, pausing in the doorway. “Maybe it’s just that his body was holding its trump card until he couldn’t go on another minute, and you saved him before he ever reached that point back in the day.”

It’s not a comforting thought. All it means was Steve wasn’t there when Bucky needed him the most.

He gives Bucky four more hours of visiting time before he opens the door. “Bucky? You need to eat.”

Bucky and Rollins have relocated to the cot into the corner of the room, lying chest to chest, clinging tightly and chastely to each other’s bodies. There’s no response.

“Bucky.”

“I’m not hungry,” Bucky says, his words muffled against Rollins’s shirt.

“Sam made oatmeal jut for you. At least give it a try, okay? You’ll like it, you used to love that stuff.”

Bucky goes tense and Steve braces himself for an argument, but Rollins is sitting up and untangling his limbs from Bucky’s. “Go on, Winter. You have to eat.”

“But Sir—”

“I’ll see—” Rollins glances at Steve and cuts himself off. “I’ll be here if you need me. You’ll always feel me, remember? But you need to take care of yourself now. When Brock wakes up, do you want him to worry?”

And just like that, Bucky’s standing up. “I love you, Sir.”

“I love you too.”

Bucky shuffles slowly through the door as Steve tries not to feel anything. He thinks that’s the end of it, but Rollins speaks up before Steve can make his own exit. “Rogers.”

“Save it.”

“Fuck off. This isn’t about me, it’s about Winter.”

“That’s not his name.” Steve’s already halfway out the door.

“Look, I’m not interested in getting in a pissing contest over what you think should be yours.” And here Steve had thought Rollins looked hateful back in the Triskelion elevator. “Winter needs to see Brock. Having a bondmate around, it helps you heal. Improves the prognosis.”

“You want me to take you on a field trip to see your partner in crime? Not happening.”

“Like I said, it’s not about me.” Rollins digs his fingers into the blankets, takes a steadying breath. “Winter _needs_ to see him, with or without me. You want his bondmate to die? And before you fucking say a word, think of what that would do to Winter. To the man you’re supposed to love.”

“I do love him.” He snarls it more than he says it. “And if I’d been there, I’d have loved him too much to let them shock the memories out of his skull.”

“But not enough to keep him from falling, huh?”

Steve doesn’t answer. He refuses to rise to the bait.

“Just take him to Brock. Just once.” Rollins has to force the next word out, face twisting like he’s just swallowed acid. “ _Please_.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Steve's mention of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman is a reference to the 1942 film _Casablanca_. "We'll always have Paris."
> 
> I was hoping this would be obvious from the conversation in context, but in case it is not: The point of Sam's discussion with Steve is not to absolve Rumlow and Rollins of their crimes or to say what they did was okay. The point was simply to say that even awful people sometimes have things about them that aren't horrible. Not that this excuses them, just that it happens.


	11. Let Daylight Dry Your Tears

It’s so damn hot.

That’s not the first thing Brock notices when he wakes. The pain demands his foremost attention. It’s always been there, throbbing under the edge of his consciousness right alongside Jack and Winter’s heartbeats. The haze of drugs kept it at bay, but now the pain rises with each pulse until he’s wide awake and praying for death. It fucking hurts. But he expected that.

He hadn’t expected the heat.

Intellectually Rumlow knows he’s been out for a while, probably weeks. That’s how burns are treated. But the _heat_ : it feels trapped under whatever’s left of his skin, smoldering, like he’s still stuck in the wreckage. Like he’s trapped and his lungs are about to fill with smoke. Brock tries to shift, to breathe, to tear off the bandaging and let out the fucking heat, but the pain and the wraps are restricting and his fingers _won’t move_ and—

Winter, _alive_ and here and perfect, is climbing onto the bed. Leaning down over Brock, the ceiling lights shining around his head, he looks like an angel. Like he stepped out of a painting by one of the old Italian masters. Brock’s _nonna_ would slap him for not knowing which one. She’d slap him for a lot of things. Most of them HYDRA-related.

“I’m here, Sir,” he says. “Open your mouth.”

When Brock does, Winter takes an ice chip from the cup in his hands and slips it between Brock’s lips. It’s like water in the desert. In hell.

“We had a mission once, somewhere hot.” Winter’s eyes are far away as he fishes out another ice chip. “There were...popsicles, I think they’re called. Mine was red and I got sick.”

“Death Valley,” Brock rasps. It was hot enough that Anders actually bought eggs to try frying them off of the van. The popsicles were Murphy’s idea, and he’d ignored Brock’s order to keep unauthorized foodstuffs away from the Soldier. Winter had puked all over the floor of the van; there’d been a moment of pure panic before they realized it wasn’t internal bleeding.

“It was nice.” Winter smiles, putting a piece of ice in his own mouth. “Before I threw up.”

Brock doesn’t answer immediately. The ice has abated the heat a little and the pain is that much more distracting as a result. “Where’s...Jack?”

“He’s in custody, Sir. He’s not hurt.” Sliding down on the bed, Winter settles beside him without touching, offering another ice chip. “They’re letting me see him.”

Custody. Winter didn’t specify whose. It can’t be HYDRA’s: why would they bother to treat Brock’s wounds or keep Jack alive? The helicarriers were destroyed, and Rogers and Romanoff are presumably still breathing. Jack would have been dispatched with a shot to the head for the failure, and Brock would have suffered the same, assuming they didn’t leave him to succumb to injury and infection.

But why would SHIELD let Winter visit?

“Where—” He coughs, making his vision swim with tears. “Where...are we?”

“The burn center at MedStar Washington Hospital.” Winter rests his head on the pillow. He’s so close. Brock would give the world to reach out and touch him, but it feels like any attempt to move will just strip off what’s left of his skin. “You’ve been here for three weeks, Sir. They were going to wait four before they woke you up, but you’re doing better than they’ve expected. I’ve been coming every day. They think the bond helped.”

“Who—” He’s coughing again. In the back of Rumlow’s mind, he knows coughing’s a good sign. It means the lungs are functioning, able to try and regulate themselves without aid. It’s hard to be happy about that, though, when it hurts so fucking bad. “ _Shit_ ,” Rumlow wheezes. “ _Aah._ ”

“You’re supposed to be on morphine,” Winter says. He shuffles back a little, barely still on the mattress. “I closed off the IV, Sir. I’m sorry.” His head ducks down as he speaks, repentant, but it’s not the cowering subservience of the asset. His eyes are almost defiant.

Brock might love that if he were capable of feeling anything beyond agony. “Why?”

“I needed to talk to you.” Winter’s tilting the cup around and around in his grip, the ice chips sloshing against the sides. The sound combined with the pain gives Brock the sense of drowning in agony. “You go away when you’re on morphine, Sir.” He lowers his gaze. “I think it’s nice, wherever you go. But I needed to talk.”

_Nice, wherever you go._ Brock hopes to hell that Winter went somewhere nice in cryo. God, let him have had at least _that_ as a respite, since Jack and Brock had achieved fuck all in improving his existence. They’d put him in the ice, they’d put him in that damn chair, and they’d sent him to kill his first bondmate, all in pursuit of some half-formed dream of happily ever after. And now that dream’s gone to ashes, but Winter’s still here at his bedside, servicing him like he’s a king. Like he’s worth it.

And just like that, all the guilt he’s kept dammed up inside breaks free.

“You need to leave,” Brock says. Every word’s like sandpaper in his throat.

Winter straightens up just enough to tilt his head. “I don’t understand.”

Brock tries to motion toward the ice again. It’s hard enough to force out a few sentences, let alone all he needs to say now. It burns from his fingertips to his chest, as if he’s on fire all over again. It’s no more than he deserves. It’s less.

And without hesitation, Winter tilts the cup toward his lips. Whatever liquid Brock manages to gulp down might replenish the amount he’s losing from his eyes, but he doubts it.

“You need...to leave me, Winter.” He won’t let his eyes slide shut. He won’t be so fucking weak. “’M not...even with a bond, I’ve only...ever hurt you. Told myself it’d be okay...it was to protect us...when really...I was too chickenshit...t’do the things a dom oughta. Fuckin’ failed you...’n I ordered...you to kill the man who’s got more right to...who was your first bondmate...if he’s alive, Winter...you deserve Rogers. Not some...lying, crippled good for nothing who’s only...let you down.”

It sounds almost noble once he’s forced it all out. The sort of shit a tragic hero would monologue before his love interest kissed the tears from his face. But it’s not noble. Rats have no nobility, and that’s what Brock is even now. He’s still abandoning his submissive, leaving him with the gaping pain of an absent bondmate. But what else can he do?

And Winter’s still right there. His face is as blank as it gets after the wipes.

“Y’need to...go, Winter,” Brock insists. His voice is slipping into hoarse nothingness. Smoke inhalation, maybe. Or damage from the debris that had fallen across his throat. “I’m no good for you. They can...give you...pheromones for the pain, or...Rogers can...I love you. But you deserve...a real partner. You deserve so much.”

But his submissive doesn’t leave. He shoves the cup against Brock’s mouth and while his shoulders twitch at the whimper of pain in reply, he doesn’t move or apologize. “Drink, Sir. I have questions. You need your voice.”

“I don’t—”

“Drink,” Winter says, the way he used to demand his guns in the field.

So Brock does. He’s got no right to deny his sub anything.

“I’m going to ask you questions. You have to be honest with me, Sir. You owe me that.”

Rather than speak and strain his voice before he has to, Brock nods. It whites out his vision from the pain, and he bites his lip to keep from whimpering.

“Why did you join HYDRA?” Winter asks, withdrawing the cup.

“I was twenty-five.” And he could stop there, honestly, because that sums it up so well. He was a young, cocky, stupid fool who’d believed in building a better world by tearing the old one down. But he goes on, because it’s not the whole truth. Because Winter was only a few years older when his life was stolen away and youth doesn’t absolve shit.

“My friends...were dying and the world was...shit and they said...they could make it better with...just a few sacrifices. And nobody’d...ever taken my freedom so...I thought, the hell does it...matter if it gives us order? My life, Win—” He cuts himself off with a bitter, burning laugh. Here he is, about to complain about his crappy life to the world’s longest suffering prisoner of war. “I wanted recognition. Wanted to be...important, respected. Get what I thought...was coming to me...once we had the world.”

They’d assured him he would have that once HYDRA had its way. They’d made it sound like the blood on his hands would be a glorious victory, not a damnation. But Brock can’t claim he was the victim. Not when he’s staring a real victim right in the face.

Winter seems to mull that over, as though Brock’s words are an unfamiliar flavor and he can’t tell if he likes the taste. He puts the cup to Brock’s lips again, no more gently. “Are you sorry? Not for me, for our targets.”

Brock begins to open his mouth.

“Be honest.”

_No_ is the word instantaneously at the tip of his tongue. It’s an automatic response, one he’s told himself over and over in the years since his twenties. _No, I don’t feel sorry. No, I don’t lose sleep at night. Sometimes you’ve gotta break a few eggs. They deserved it, they went against the order that’s gonna save the world. And if you want order, you’ve gotta have pain._

But then he’d bonded with Winter and Jack, and he’d stopped being able to sleep. Because suddenly, all that was necessary to keep the Soldier in line was fucking horrible and maybe, just maybe everything else he’d done had been horrible too. Brock doesn’t know if that’s remorse. It’s probably just a side effect of having a decent human’s soul grafted to his own. It certainly doesn’t redeem him.

“I don’t know,” he says, because he doesn’t.

Winter doesn’t respond. His mouth is in a thin line.

“I’m sorry for...what I did with Rogers.” That much is true. To try and make Winter kill his first and true love—a man who hadn’t even been bad, just on the damn wrong side—it’s evil. It’s unforgivable. “I’m so sorry, Winter...for everything we did to you. I hope...” His voice cracks. Brock doesn’t know if it’s strain or emotion. “I hope the two of you...are happy. Hope Rogers...gives you the world.”

“You don’t get off that easy, Sir,” Winter says, sitting fully upright.

And Rumlow stares. “I—”

“I’m going to talk and you’re going to listen,” he says. His eyes aren’t Winter’s anymore. Brock’s not sure who they belong to, but if he had to hazard a guess, he’d say Bucky Barnes. “I’m bonded to you. To Jack. And you haven’t done your job so far. You gave me more comfort than I’d had in so long, Sir, but it wasn’t enough. So you have to fix that now. You have to make things right. Not just for me. For everyone.”

“Winter.” And after everything, the man still wants to redeem him. If ever there was a sign that Rumlow’s not worthy of Winter, that’s it. “By all rights...you belong to Rogers. Let him take care—”

“I don’t belong to anyone anymore, Sir,” Winter snaps, a snarl in his voice. “We’re bonded. So you’re mine as much as I’m yours. I’m going to talk and you’re going to listen. People bond for a reason. I don’t know why, but there’s a reason I bonded with you two. Maybe something you haven’t done yet. Maybe I’m your redemption.”

“That...can’t fall on you, Winter.” Brock shakes his head, not bothering to hold the groan in this time. “You aren’t...responsible for fixing our mess. You’re...the victim.”

“I’m not doing it because I have to. I want to. I want _you,_ both of you, all three of you, but you have to want this too. You have to _want_ to be sorry, to make amends. If you can’t—” Winter closes his eyes, tenses, letting out a slow breath. “Then I’ll leave. I’ll let them lock you up. No matter how much it hurts.” He looks at Brock. His eyes are wide and as pleading as they used to be when he sat in the chair. “You have to try.”

“Babe...I’ll only end up hurting you.”

“I’ll take the risk. Don’t be a coward. _Sir._ ”

Three weeks, Winter had said Brock slept. Three weeks away from HYDRA was all it took for his submissive to regain his voice and his will. To become as forceful off the field as he’d ever been on it.

Brock’s torn between drowning under a tidal wave of self-hatred for not freeing him the instant they bonded and going dizzy with love. He’s mildly surprised there’s not an erection throbbing between his legs at his submissive’s authority, but for all he knows his dick’s burned off. That seems only fair.

“I’ll try.” It sounds hollow to his own ears, but Winter smiles.

“Then I’ll give you back your morphine, Sir.” He reaches over Brock’s body and clicks something on one of the IV lines. “You need to rest. I’ll try and have them bring Jack to see you, now that you’re awake.”

“Did he—”

“He said he’d try too.” Winter cranes down to press his lips against Brock’s forehead, brushing a hand along his hair. “I love you, Sir.”

“I don’t deserve you.”

“Maybe not yet.”

After Brock’s slipped back under, James—sometimes Winter, sometimes Soldier, not yet Bucky—slips out of the bed. Steve is in the doorway. Steve doesn’t let James near his bondmates with supervision, sleeping or awake. James doesn’t mind the watching as long as he can see them. “Something you want to say?” he asks, not because he thinks it wise but because the old him would have.

James can remember a little more of the old him every day. He thinks he likes the man he was.

Steve sets his jaw and shakes his head. “I don’t want to argue, Buck.”

“I want to kiss you,” James says, before he realizes that’s not what his old self would have said. It’s what Peggy might have told him. He remembers a lot of Peggy: her smile and her pretty hair and the way she used to touch him. “Sir,” he adds, dropping his gaze.

He can’t help smiling a little when Steve sputters, gaping. “You’re not—we aren’t—”

“I don’t care about bonds.” James crosses his arms, raising his head back to his full height. “We never needed one then. We don’t need one now. ‘Till the end of the line, remember?”

Steve’s looking past James at Brock’s body. No matter how much he hates the man, James knows, he wouldn’t break up a bond, not now that he knows it’s real. “You’re—”

“I want the three of you. I told Brock. I told Jack. They didn’t argue. And after everything?” James shrugs. “They’re in no position to tell me what I can and can’t have. At least hug me, Sir. I’m sick of being cross with you. Hug me, please.”

And Steve does. He’s big and solid and so warm that James can feel the heat spread to his bondmates. He can’t feel Steve the way he feels Brock and Jack, but he doesn’t need to. He knows Steve well enough to know that this will work. It has to work.

It seems like he spends an eternity in Steve’s embrace. There are tears on his face, but James is smiling through them. Steve frees a hand to wipe them away, his touch as warm and soothing as pure sunlight after ages in the ice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Italian artist whose name Rumlow can't recall is [Botticelli.](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Botticelli_Uffizi_37.jpg)


	12. Anywhere You Go Let Me Go Too

“You’re sure this is all right?” Steve asks for what must be the thousandth time this morning.

James rolls his eyes, reclining in the passenger seat. “Even if it weren’t—and it is—we’ve been driving for two hours. I wouldn’t make you turn around to take me back. It’d throw off the whole schedule.”

“Feet off the dash, Buck.”

“Yes, Sir.” James pulls his legs down, tilting the seat farther back as he does, resting his left hand on his thigh. The prosthetic arm just feels so heavy sometimes. Tony’s looking into a blend of metals to try and recreate the strength and durability at a lighter weight, but the process of replacement is going to be unpleasant to put it mildly. At least he’ll have Brock alongside him for the physical therapy.

He lets his eyes slide shut, but he can still feel Steve’s stare. James sighs. “We’ve done this every Tuesday for the past two years, Steve. They’ve learned to plan around it.”

Steve flips on the turn signal, shifting into the left lane. “Most Tuesdays aren’t your anniversary.”

He’s gotten better as time’s gone by when it comes to dealing with the bond. Last year, James doubts Steve would have been able to bring himself to say “anniversary,” even though he’d stopped snarling at the mention of James’s bondmates by then. His voice is only a little rough now.

“I’ll make this work,” Steve had said after Brock and Jack agreed to an open relationship. “For you. But we’re not gonna be friends, Bucky.”

James hasn’t given up the little hope that one day they will be.

“We’ll get back with time to celebrate,” James says. He doesn’t say that the anniversary means more to his bondmates than it does to him. He absolutely doesn’t bring up that, of the memories he’s recovered, the bonding they’re celebrating today isn’t one of them. For Jack and Brock, it’s a the marking of a life-changing event. For James, it’s just another day. Every day away from HYDRA, every day with love and choice and freedom, is equally savored.

But he could feel how excited his bondmates were, so he’d agreed to be back in a timely fashion.

“When are you going to cut your hair, boy?” is the first thing out of Peggy’s mouth when they walk into her room. James smiles. If she remembers him, she’ll definitely remember Steve. And that means this visit won’t end with Steve trying to smile despite his wet eyes on the drive back.

“But if I cut it, Mistress,” he says, pouring her a glass of water, “what would you complain about?”

“Your smart mouth, to begin with.” She extends her hand and James makes sure her hold on the glass is stable before he releases. “And your insistence on waiting on me hand and foot. Dominants care for their submissives, James. Don’t tell me you’ve gone modern.”

“I don’t care about status.” He settles down beside Steve in the chairs at her bedside. “I love you and I love any little gesture that shows it.”

Steve smiles a bit wider at that, intertwining his fingers with James’s.

“You were always disgustingly sentimental.” Peggy shakes her head, quelling the start of a cough with a swallow of the water. “Both of you. Steve, tell me at least that the bastards he’s fallen for are caring for him. Surely I can trust you to see to that?”

“They love me,” James says.

“I’ll never let anyone hurt him again, Peggy, you know that,” says Steve at the same time.

“Hmmph,” is all she says for a long moment, examining the two of them over the rim of the glass. “Let me see your hands, boy.”

He holds them out and Peggy grabs hold, frowning at the left. “Haven’t they gotten you a ring yet? You were always so fond of the things.”

James doesn’t point out that his bondmates have little in the way of disposable income. He doesn’t say he’s researched diamonds and a lot of them are available now due to exploitation and he’d like not to exploit anyone ever if he can help it. What he says is, “Should I bring them in for you to reprimand, Mistress? You could show them your right hook.”

“Don’t patronize me, James. Those days are far behind me.” She strokes his hand before she releases it, then straightens her bedclothes. “If you brought them in now, I’d have to shoot them instead.”

“Because they’re HYDRA, or because he doesn’t have a ring?” Steve asks.

“The first few shots because they’re bloody HYDRA. The next three can cover all their other flaws.”

Of course, they’re not HYDRA. Not anymore. One of the ultimatums James had insisted on was exit counseling, the kind used to deprogram cult members.

“They weren’t the ones who’d been programmed, Buck,” Steve had said.

“There’s more than one kind of brainwashing,” James had retorted, grabbing Steve’s tablet and bringing up links about Milgram and the Hofling Hospital. “Anybody can be manipulated. That doesn’t make it okay, what they did. But it doesn’t mean they can’t make amends either.”

Sometimes the going’s been easy. Brock and Jack were in HYDRA long enough to know that all the “better” world they were promised they’d be building really meant was that HYDRA’s leaders would have everyone cowering under their heel. Long enough that loyalty and fear started to taste just the same.

Sometimes it’s not easy. One of the conditions James negotiated for their plea deal was that they had to spill every last secret of HYDRA’s that they knew, and if they weren’t already marked for death by what remains of the organization, they certainly will be if their cooperation is leaked. There are days when Jack comes back from the therapists—who ask question after question for hours, according to James’s research, trying to spark empathy—and the look in his eyes says he’d hate James if not for their bond. It’s worse with Brock, because he has the pain and the physical limitations compounding any stress.

But it’s getting better. Brock’s been out of rehab for a month now, and every night they pile in bed together and fall asleep in the faint glow of the television. Snuggled between them, feeling their hands stroke down his sides and his hair, James could cry with contentment. He’s as loved and safe as he always felt with Peggy and Steve. It’ll all work out in the end. It has to.

The air smells like cinnamon and apple as soon as James steps out of the elevator onto their floor of the tower. There’s pie cooling on the table, but he doesn’t make it that far before his lovers are sandwiching him between them, peppering his face and hair with kisses.

“What recipe did you use, Sir?” James asks Jack once his lips are free.

The two of them have taken up cooking as hobby, working their way through every recipe in a stack of cookbooks Pepper lent them. They got the idea from a movie that Brock had called girly and stupid before they watched it, and then he’d spent the runtime pretending not to be glued to the screen. They needed something to do between missions. Their missions aren’t frequent either: James is easily overwhelmed by memories and no one trusts Jack without James at his side. Cooking is calming. It’s nice to put something together instead of tearing it apart.

Brock isn’t allowed to help, because Jack says Brock once set fire to a crockpot. Brock doesn’t want to help anyway; he doesn’t like gas stoves.

“This one’s my mother’s recipe,” Jack explains. They take James by the hands and lead him to the table. Instead of sitting him at his usual chair, they go to Jack’s and guide James to sit on his lap. Brock, who has almost all of the mobility back in his hands now, slides forkfuls of pie between James’s lips.

James thinks that Jack’s mother makes better pie than any cookbook could.

After the pie they bring out a present wrapped in newspaper.

“But I don’t have anything for you,” James says, hesitating. He forgot that people give presents on anniversaries. He’s forgotten so many things.

“You gave us our lives back,” Brock says. “That’s more than we could ever ask for.”

The wrapped up box is heavy and nearly the length of James’s forearm. He doubts it’s a ring and he wonders what Peggy would say.

Inside the box is a very thick, very pink, glittery dildo. It sparkles, probably more than any diamond could.

James thinks he will not mention this to Peggy.

Brock leans in, brushing his lips against James’s jawline. “See, Winter, we were thinking. There’s nothing we can do to ever fully make up for all that we put you through. But I thought giving you an orgasm for every year you were locked up might be a _start_.”

James’s breath hitches. Brock grins against his neck. “Of course, Jack, ever the voice of reason—”

“I said it would take days even for you.” Jack’s grinning. James can hear it in his voice. “Not that I’m _opposed_ to that, but we’re not super soldiers. We’d both get carpal tunnel and Brock’s dick would fall off.”

“So we got you this!” Brock nips at James’s ear, his scarred skin smooth against James’s stubble. “And it’s your favorite color, see?”

“It’s very big, Sir,” James says, because he can’t think of anything else to say. He’s dimly aware that his pants are growing too tight.

“You can take it,” Brock says. He’s standing, reaching out to guide James up. “I have full confidence in you, Winter. Besides,” and he raises his free hand, flexing his fingers. “I can help. Probably counts as physical therapy.”

A full half hour later and they haven’t moved past the helping. Jack sits against the headboard, his hands on James’s chest, steadying him on the mattress. Brock is between James’s legs, three fingers stretched wide inside of him while the opposite hand grips his thigh. The intrusion is broad but not filling and James whimpers, trying to press into the touch. They’re teasing him: sometimes Jack will run his nails feather light over James’s nipples, or Brock’s fingertips will ghost on his prostate, forcing a cry from his throat, but they keep him in limbo, trembling. James tries to remember how to beg. Tries to remember how to _speak._

“You’re so patient, Winter,” Brock soothes. There’s another almost-touch against that sweet spot inside him and James’s strangled cry is muffled by the press of Jack’s lips against his own. “You think you’re ready?” Brock continues, his grin a little crooked. “I don’t want to rush you—”

“Please, Sir,” James gasps, tilting his head when he realizes he’s speaking into Jack’s mouth. “Please please _please_...”

And Jack straightens up, grinning. “My turn.”

When he whines as Brock withdraws his fingers, his dominants smile sympathetically and stroke his hair. They drizzle lube all over the dildo, James’s own body already slick from Brock’s preparation. Then they trade places on the bed, Brock stilling James’s hips as Jack carefully pushes the toy against their submissive, sliding it in millimeter by agonizing millimeter.

James is whining again, mewling. He doesn’t know if he’s shaking with the desire to be filled faster or from the gentle burn of the stretch. Jack is kissing along James’s thigh, murmuring how good he’s being for them, how pretty he looks all opened up and needy. Brock is sucking bruises into James’s throat, raking his nails down James’s heaving chest.

And then it’s in, the base flush against his body, the shaft pressing against his prostate. James can’t keep still, limply writhing on the bed. His mouth has fallen open, his tongue too sluggish to respond to Brock’s kisses. “You’re take it so well,” Jack says, from what feels like so far away. “You’re so beautiful, Winter.”

Brock sits up, his hand hovering just beside James’s cock. “You ready?”

James, so full and good but not _enough_ , pants, glares. He’s been ready for half an hour, please please _please._

It isn’t until Brock’s hand closes around his cock that James realizes it was Jack he was speaking to. And right as Brock touches him, Jack flips a switch at the base of the dildo. It flickers to life, vibrating against his prostate, his hips reverberating with the force of it.

James howls.

The first orgasm is quick after that. The remaining sixty-nine take considerably more effort.

They don’t leave their floor of the tower for a week. When all is said and done, they’re collapsed on the bed, sweat-drenched and aching. Brock and Jack are out cold when Steve opens the door. Sleepily, James thinks he must be panicked; James hasn’t checked his phone since the lunch break on Day Four.

Steve stands in the doorway, staring, and James’s half-conscious mind tries to steel itself for shouting. But Steve only shakes his head. It’s probably the exhaustion at work, but James swears he’s smiling a little. “Get some sleep, Buck. And warn a guy next time before you disappear, all right?”

Dreamily, James nods, sinking against the pillows. “Yes, Sir.”

His eyes are watering with contentment, but he's out cold before the tears can fall.


End file.
